This isn't the place to talk about the details of how to get published (that happens in the dedicated publishing section ). But it is the place to discuss how easy (or not) it will be to publish your fiction.
Why? Because it will have a massive impact on your motivation levels.
If I told you that getting published is an "over the rainbow" dream, that for every writer who makes it, 199 won't, that's going to put a huge dampener on your efforts. You'll be okay on the good days. But on the bad days, when things are not going so well, those 1-in-200 odds will eat away at you and make you question whether writing a novel is worth it at all.
Incidentally, I didn't pick "1-in-200" out of thin air. A decade ago (back before the Internet opened up a huge range of opportunities for novelists), agents and publishers collectively rejected 99.5% of manuscripts.
So if I'd been writing this article a decade ago, I would have had to try to motivate you by saying something like this.
Finding a publisher or an agent isn't easy, but neither is it impossible. You'll likely experience many rejections in your quest to get published, but the trick is to keep going and believe in your talents. After all, cream always rises to the top in the end!
Even if your first novel fails to find a publisher, there is always your second novel. And the odds of that one being accepted are much stronger (because the first book would have taught you so much). So.
Never allow the seemingly poor chances of success put you off writing a novel. Equally, don't let the possibility of success (including making money from writing fiction) be your prime motivator. Besides, writing a novel purely for financial reward is unlikely to result in the best novel you can write.
And that would have been true – to an extent. Why wouldn't it have been the whole truth? Two reasons.
First, a lot of bad books were published during the "good old days of publishing." And a lot of good books went unpublished.
(When I say "bad" and "good," I'm not snobbishly talking about "trashy" genre fiction vs. "highbrow" literary fiction. I mean good and bad novels of their type. You can have excellent "airport novels" and truly awful literary fiction.)
Now, none of this was down to luck or injustice. It boiled down to numbers.
- If the publishers saw a large enough market for a novel, who cared if the critics were going to trash the book? If they couldn't see a large enough market, the excellence of a novel counted for nothing.
The second problem with traditional publishing was that the majority of published writers couldn't make a living from writing books. The tiny percentage of published writers who were household names earned virtually all of the money. The rest of them failed to earn back their meagre advances and were stuck in their day jobs.
