Scenario #1: You rush home from school, yank open the mailbox, and . . . yes! It’s a letter from a publisher! Your hands shake as you open it. Your eyes have trouble focusing, and then you read that killer first sentence: “Thank you for your recent submission; however, it does not fit our editorial needs at this time.” Bummer. That’s your twelfth rejection letter! You’re starting to wonder if you’ve got what it takes to be a writer after all.
Be prepared: It is very, very likely that you will get rejected before you get your first piece of writing published. Next, keep it in perspective. This is part of being a writer. Welcome to the club. Every writer gets rejected at some point. But remember, it’s not you that is getting rejected. If a magazine or book publisher says no to your proposal, that only means that your writing wasn’t suitable for that particular company at that particular time. It doesn’t necessarily mean your writing is no good—it could mean that an editor just published a book similar to yours or that the magazine has decided to go with a different kind of material for the next few issues.
Whatever the reason, if you have sent your very best work, don’t be discouraged. Rejection doesn’t mean you don’t have talent. If you are serious about getting your work published and are willing to do the homework, you will succeed. Keep sending out those proposals and keep on writing. Your day will come.
Also keep in mind that just because your story didn’t work for an editor in November, it may be just what she’s looking for in May. Keep an eye on the market and on their staff. If you are determined your piece is right for that magazine or publishing house, you may try resubmitting if current events line up to better showcase the timeliness of your idea. And you can always send your story to a different editor who has never seen it before. Times change. . .and so do editors and their interests. So don’t give up.
Scenario #2: The phone rings and you pick it up. It’s an editor from your favorite magazine, asking, “Is Megan there?” Your fingers go numb and it takes all your strength to keep from dropping the phone. Your knees start to buckle and your voice shakes as you squeal, “Yes, I’m Megan!” The editor says, “We’d like to use the manuscript you sent us.” You practically faint! It’s your dream come true.
Don’t drop the phone and do sit down! This could be your reality. When your writing is finally accepted for publication, it will surely be one of the most exciting moments of your life.
Besides staying cool, calm, and collected, what are you supposed to do if your dreams come true and they say yes? If you work hard and do get something accepted for publication, there are a few things you should know about the business side of writing.
When a magazine or book publisher agrees to publish your work, the first thing that will happen is that you will receive a contract to sign. When you see that first contract, you may say, “It’s all Greek to me,” but the good news is that legalese (the legal language that contracts are written in) will get easier for you to understand the more you get published.
The rules of contracts and payment are different for magazines and books, so we’ll describe both.
Magazines will pay you one time for using your writing. But not all magazines (and especially those that feature writing for kids) pay for writing in dollars and cents. Instead, they may send you some free copies of the issue in which your article, story, or poem appears. Or they might give you a year’s subscription to the magazine.
If a magazine does pay you money for your writing, you will either get paid “on publication” or “on acceptance.” Getting paid on publication means you’ll get paid when your writing appears in the magazine. If your writing is accepted in March and the magazine plans to print your writing in the December issue, you’ll get paid in December. Getting paid on acceptance is exactly what it sounds like—you get paid when the magazine agrees to buy your work. This kind of payment information should be in the writer’s guidelines that you sent away for. (You did that, right?)
Take a look at the sample magazine contract on the next page. It’s fairly simple—not too much legal mumbo jumbo!
Book contracts are usually a lot longer than magazine contracts. If you receive a book contract, you should definitely go over it with someone who knows something about contracts and legalese (a literary agent is good for this and will normally consult if you don’t wish to use their services for negotiations) and have them explain it all to you. Always make sure you completely understand what you are signing. Each book publisher has different payment arrangements, just like magazines. For example, some publishers pay a flat fee, which means they pay you just once, like magazines. But most book publishers pay what are called royalties.
Royalties (hey, you get to be the king or queen here!) are what the publisher pays you in exchange for you letting them publish your writing. A royalty is a percentage of the cover price for every book the publisher sells. That percentage can vary anywhere from 2 percent to 20 percent and will be listed in your contract. So, if a publisher charged $10 for your book and you got a 10 percent royalty, you would get $1 for each book they sold. Got it? When you get to the royalty section of the contract, get out that calculator.
Royalty checks are usually paid a few times a year and continue as long as your book keeps selling. Sometimes a publisher will pay you what is called an advance. An advance is a payment the publisher makes to you before your book is in the stores. It’s not extra money, just part of your royalties that they pay you up front. If a publisher gives you a $1,000 advance, they will deduct that from your later royalty payments. Getting an advance means that a publisher is pretty confident that your book is going to sell well. Stephen King gets huge advances because everything he writes is almost guaranteed to sell millions of copies. First-time authors, on the other hand, usually don’t get paid advances. And some smaller publishers never pay advances because they operate on smaller budgets.
Literary journals and magazine guidelines will tell you what kind of rights they are buying when you agree to let them publish your work. Rights? What are rights? If you write something, you are legally the owner of that material—you own the rights to it. When a magazine buys your work, it usually asks to “buy all rights.” That means that you, the author, are selling your rights to the material; you no longer own what you have written. In other words, if you sell “all rights” to one of your stories to Teen magazine, don’t even think of trying to re-sell it to Cosmo Girl! That’s illegal!
Don’t worry too much about selling all rights. That’s what most first-time authors do when they’re starting out. As you get published more and develop a name for yourself as an author, you will be in a better position to ask for more rights. Sometimes a magazine only wants first serial rights, or one-time rights, which means they only want the right to publish your work once, and then all rights are returned to you. With that kind of deal, you may be able to sell the same story to a different magazine or book publisher later.
Even if you sell all rights to a magazine, if you contact them after the piece has been published and ask for your rights back, often they’ll agree. When you’re starting out as a writer, getting those first few pieces published is the most important thing. Editors are more impressed if you’ve been published before—they’re more likely to read your proposal more carefully. So, in the beginning, don’t worry so much about how much you’re going to get paid and what rights you can keep. You can haggle about all that when you’re a famous writer.
Book contracts also specify which kinds of rights they want to buy from you and what kind of royalty (if any) you’ll be paid for each. The same rules apply as for magazines: be sure to understand what you’re selling and make sure you feel like you’re getting a fair deal. Again, it’s best to have a lawyer or knowledgeable adult go over the rights section of the contract with you.
Once your work has been accepted and your contract is signed, an editor will begin working with you on your manuscript. Yes, even after all your careful writing and rewriting, chances are that your work will be edited again before it goes to print. Everyone gets edited, even famous writers, and a good editor usually makes your work even better. But working with editors can be a fun experience and should improve your writing—that’s their job, after all.
Good editors help you fine-tune your ideas and words even more than you already have. And good authors are open to suggestions and excited to make their writing the best it can be. Editors and writers are like the two wheels on a bike—they work better together than alone! To give you an idea of just what an editor does, here is an example of a paragraph from this very book, before and after editing. Better, right? We thought so too!
Once you and your editor have a final manuscript completed, you should get a final copy to review one last time. Not all publishers, especially the big ones, remember to do this. So make sure to ask your editor for last review before it goes off to the printer. This is not the time for you to rewrite whole pages—it’s too late for that! It’s also not the time to worry about grammar mistakes. Point any out that you happen to notice, but a professional proofreader should catch those.
This is the time for you to make sure you are happy with the final edits that have been made to your book and to make sure they haven’t changed any facts in a way that would make them untrue or inaccurate. Read over your copy carefully and then send it back to the editor with any changes you find, marked in ink.
After your last review of the book, it’s time to be patient—it’s tough but necessary. There is no average when it comes to how much time passes between when your work is accepted and when you finally see it in print, but a year is not unusual, even for a magazine article. For a book, it can sometimes take several years to see the final product! Believe us, it is worth the wait! Just don’t start running to your mailbox as soon as you’ve sent off your final corrections.
After all your work writing and editing, and after all your patient waiting, your book will finally get published and show up in bookstores. Pretty exciting! But even more exciting is when you get to do your first book signings and interviews. This is called publicity. You may be nervous about this aspect of being a writer, and that’s totally normal. But remember, publicity helps sell your book (which means more royalties for you!) and lets you meet the people who are reading your work: your fans! Not only do you get to see your name in print, you may even make it onto the Today show (or at least get an interview in your local paper!). And what a great feeling to have a total stranger say to you, “I just loved your book. You’re such a fabulous writer. Can you autograph my copy, please?” bookstores. Pretty exciting! But even more exciting is when you get to do your first book signings and interviews. This is called publicity. You may be nervous about this aspect of being a writer, and that’s totally normal. But remember, publicity helps sell your book (which means more royalties for you!) and lets you meet the people who are reading your work: your fans! Not only do you get to see your name in print, you may even make it onto the Today show (or at least get an interview in your local paper!). And what a great feeling to have a total stranger say to you, “ I just loved your book. You’ re such a fabulous writer. Can you autograph my copy, please?”
We talked in this chapter about what happens if you get a magazine article or a book published, but the reality is that if you decide you want be a writer, you will probably write lots of different things. You will write a million cover letters, that’s for sure. But it’s worth it. No matter how many times your writing is published, every time you see the finished product you feel just as excited as the first time. Seeing your words in print never gets old!
And just as you can try many different kinds of writing, you can also try many different kinds of writing careers. You may start out writing novels and then move on to writing a screenplay when Hollywood decides to turn your bestseller into a movie. Or you may work as an ace reporter covering news in Europe or as a sports writer for ESPN. There are tons of exciting writing careers just waiting for you!
Mattie Stepanek was an American poet who had six books of poetry and one book of essays all reach the New York Times bestsellers list. Despite suffering from a rare form of muscular dystrophy that ended his life just before his fourteenth birthday, Mattie accomplished more than many people do in a much longer lifetime. At age three, Mattie started to write poetry as a means of coping with the death of his older brother. He appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live, and Good Morning America, acted as Muscular Dystrophy Association National Goodwill Ambassador, and became a motivational speaker and lobbyist on Capitol Hill on behalf of peace, people with disabilities, and children with life-threatening conditions.
His last book, Just Peace: A Message of Hope, was awarded the IPPY Gold Medal for Peacemaker Book of the Year. His funeral was attended by friends affected by his work, including Oprah Winfrey. Jimmy Carter delivered his eulogy.
We were lucky enough to talk to Mattie when he was eleven years old:
What kind of writer are you?
Mostly I write things that combine what I feel in my heart and my spirit with what I know in my head. I guess you could call much of what I write my philosophy on life. A lot of my work is poetry, but I also write short stories and essays on many different topics, and I always keep a journal. Some of my poems and stories are funny or silly. Some of them are about difficult or sad things, like when my brother died, or what it’s like living with a disability, or how it felt to go through a divorce. Sometimes I write because a marvelous idea pops into my head and it becomes a story. I make an outline of chapters, then I just go and write and write and write. Other times, I might feel emotionally down about something, or excited, or angry, or confused, or thankful. Whatever my feeling is, it helps to write about how it is affecting me.
What advice do you have for other kid writers?
If you are having a difficult time coming up with something to write about, start by describing something in an unusual way. For example, look outside and describe a tree, without mentioning words like green, brown, branches, or leaves. Describe how it makes you feel or think. Describe what it sounds like. Describe how it smells. Describe a memory that it makes you think about. You can describe people, places, objects, all kinds of things. Use all of your senses, especially the ones that you wouldn’t typically associate with what you are describing. The grammar and spelling and spacing can all come later. The most important thing is to get your unique ideas out. Use a tape recorder and then transcribe it, or dictate your thoughts to someone else if the actual mechanics of writing are difficult or tiresome. But get your ideas and thoughts and feelings into words, and capture them . . . for yourself and for others.
Do you ever get writer’s block? If so, what helps you get through it?
Like most people, I do get writer’s block. Sometimes I think it’s because I have too much on my mind at certain times or because I am trying too hard to write about a certain topic. When this happens, I slow down and spend more time just writing in my journal. I might just describe a thought or a smell, or list my favorite activities or TV shows. When I relax and just begin writing about what I see, hear, feel, or think, the words begin to come easily. Then I can go back and take one of my journal entries to create a poem, essay, or short story based on what I wrote.
What is your favorite thing about writing?
My favorite things about writing are that I get to use my imagination and that I am able to share my philosophy and “Heartsongs” with other people. I always enjoy writing. No matter how I am feeling, writing makes me feel better. It helps me calm down when I am upset, it helps me give thanks and celebrate when I am happy, and it helps me organize my creativity when I have a good idea.
Here is a selection from Mattie’s extensive poetry collection:
Some people think that
Wishing is childish.
But wishing is
For everybody.
Wishing can help the
Old feel young, and
Wishing can help the
Young grow into the
Wisdom of age.
Wishing is not
Prayer or magic,
But somewhere in between.
Like prayer and magic,
Wishing brings optimism,
And wishing brings hope.
And like prayer and magic,
Wishing brings new ideas,
And sometimes,
The touch of new life.
And that, is essential
For our future.
