Great stories, well written

Publishers have always claimed that all they're looking for is a 'great story, well written.' This is what they plough through their slush piles for; this is what they live in hope of finding. That's all - just a great story, well written. Supply one of those, and you have a good chance of publication.

Easy, yes? Well, without wishing to come across all Carrie Bradshaw, the other day I found myself wondering this:

Is it still true that all you need to get published these days is a great story that's well written?

More and more regularly I see such offerings turned down, over and over and over until the author has no faith left in either their story-telling or their writing.

What they often don't realise (and which I have learned over the last year at some considerable cost) is that publishing seems to have been turned on its head. It's not the publisher looking for something wonderful that consumes them entirely, it's the bookseller looking for something to rival Dan Brown before considering giving you shelf space. It's the marketeers who look for titles and covers and concepts that might garner a little of that shelf space, and then it's the editors trying to shape whatever great-story-well-written they might have up their sleeve to fit market forces. The publishing pyramid seems to have been completely subverted, and dangling off the dangerous pointy bits are the two sets of people that seem to be most ignored - the reader, and the author.

A case in point is this response from a publisher to the submission of one of my books - and I quote: thank you so much for sending me this lively and entertaining book, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I think Jill has a wonderfully engaging and distinctive narrative voice and I wish I could take this further. However, we are publishing into such a difficult market at the moment that we can only really take on authors with a strong library track record in both the UK and US, whose hardcover success we can then build on.

Bear in mind that this is a book that's already publshed elsewhere, so it's not an unknown quantity, and I have many books in the libraries, just not in hardback. Just how do you compete with that? And I'm not a new author; how does someone with no track record at all manage to get published?

It's all rather sad. It feels hopeless, somehow.

On the other hand, it does drive one back to basics. When I first started writing - in fact, for the first several books - I wasn't thinking about territories and libraries and hardback covers versus paperbacks. I was just enjoying the writing. The fact that anyone else in the world wanted to share these stories with me was succour to me, and the relationship between author and reader was the most important element to it all.

So now, that's me again. Back to basics. Writing because I love it; writing perhaps because I do know my readers love it and I have hope that I'll still be able to reach them somehow, someday; writing because I can't stop myself.

And I still have some pride in my work. I'm sure that for the most part, they're great stories, well written, and perhaps one day in the near future that will once more be enough.

For the record, if the 'great stories, well written' tag does still lead to publication, then here are my hot tips for some new fiction authors who deserve to be published very soon: Stina Kornfeld, Geoff Vause, Anaru Bickford, Glenn Wood, Phillip Simpson, Julie Scott ... I know there are many more, but I haven't seen all their work. Good luck, you guys.