This article gives a lot of good tips in terms of vetting publishers. I’m not going to add this disclaimer to all the listings, because it covers all of them.

Outside of these links, we still have many resources available on the Authors Publish website. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should browse The 2024 Guide to Manuscript Publishers. The book consolidates 285 publisher reviews into one resource.

You should also check out the Manuscript Publishers category on our website. This includes our latest review of publishers, as well as the longer lists we’ve published. 

Distributors

Sidenote: One of the best ways to judge any distributor is to ask yourself the question – have I ever seen any of the publishers’ books they distribute in bookstores? Not all distributors are created equal.

Asterism
After the recent closure of SPD (which you can read about here), they have grown a lot. Mostly distributes for small literary presses.

Itasca Books
A division of Bookmobile, they have also tried to fill the gap left by SPD. They also distribute primarily for small literary presses.

Publishers Group West (PGW)
A once independent distributor that is now part of Ingram, they represent some pretty large US-based publishers. While anyone can be distributed by Ingram, and it means essentially nothing in and of itself, being distributed by a company within Ingram like PGW, that only takes on select publishers, is meaningful and a good sign. I regularly see books distributed by PGW in bookstores.

Two Rivers Distribution
Also run by Ingram, also has a mostly select client base. I have seen books they distribute in bookstores regularly.

Penguin Random House Distribution
As expected, they have a very select client base and excellent distribution. Most of the publishers they work with aren’t open to direct submissions, but some are.

MacMillan Distribution
They have a pretty select client base and excellent distribution. Most of the publishers they work with aren’t open to direct submissions, but some are.

Lerner Publisher Services
A great distributor focused on the children’s book market.

Websites/Databases

Chill Subs
They started listing independent publishers about a year ago on their searchable database.

Reedsy
Their database has been active for about three years now, and while they say it is vetted, it includes many publishers that we would not review or feature because of known predatory behavior.

Duotrope
They charge, but if you already pay to access their literary journal listings, it can be worth it. Their publisher listings are a lot more limited over all.

Poets & Writers
Not always up to date, or accurate, but a fair number of publishers are listed and it’s free.

Twelve Mile Review is published in the Summer and Winter each year, and each edition features poetry from around 25 to 30 contributors. The issues are sold on Amazon.

There are no excerpts available for submitting authors, but you can still get a sense of what they’re looking for by reading the editors’ notes. They say: “What are we looking for? Poetry that explores the overlaps and borderlines, the interstices, the eddies and turbulences of change, — personal, cultural, environmental. Strong, clear, diverse voices.”  They are also looking for imagery that’s striking and memorable, and language that feels unexpected and new.

Twelve Mile Review accepts submissions year-round, and right now they’re reading for their Summer 2024 issue. Poets may submit three to five poems. All submissions should include an author bio and contact information on each page.

They aim to respond to all submissions within 90 days. All poets published in the journal receive one contributor copy.

Twelve Mile Review accepts submissions via email, not online or by post. They accept simultaneous submissions but ask that authors withdraw poems published elsewhere. They do not accept previously published work.

Twelve Mile Review only accepts submissions that follow the guidelines they’ve posted online. Please read these guidelines in full before submitting.

If you would like to learn more or submit to Twelve Mile Review, please visit their website here. 

Bio: Ella Peary is the pen name for an author, editor, creative writing mentor, and submission consultant. Over the past five years, she’s written hundreds of articles for Authors Publish, and she’s also served as a copywriter and copy editor for a wide range of organizations and individuals. She is the author of The Quick Start Guide to Flash Fiction. She occasionally teaches a course on flash fiction. You can contact her at ellapeary@gmail.com.

This article should also serve as inspiration for younger writers who have not had much success with publishing. Sometimes success comes later. One of the authors on this list published their first book after working on it for 33 years.

1. Harriet Doerr was an author whose debut novel, Stones for Ibarra, was published when she was 74. Stones for Ibarra went on to win the National Book Award. It is a modern classic. It is also a personal favorite of mine.

2. Raymond Chandler started publishing short stories in pulp magazines in his forties, but it wasn’t until he was 51 when his first book, The Big Sleep, came out.

3. Elizabeth Jolley an English author who settled in Australia, started writing early on, but her first collection, Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories, was not published till she was 53. She went on to publish 20 other books and win many awards.

4. Richard Adams published the classic Watership Down when he was 52. He went on to publish over 20 other books after that.

5. Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn, a powerful novel about Vietnam, worked on his manuscript for 33 years. Matterhorn was finally  published when he was in his sixties.

6. Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of The Little House on the Prairie series did not start writing her series till she was in her sixties.

7. Frank McCourt, the famous and bestselling author of Angela’s Ashes, published his first book at the age of 66.

8. Daniel Defoe published his first novel, the influential Robinson Crusoe, at age 59.

9. Delia Owens was 70 when her debut novel Where The Crawdad’s Sing was published, although the nonfiction books she had co-authored with her husband were already international bestsellers.

10. Charles Bukowski worked at the post office and published the occasional poem and short story when he was younger, but it wasn’t till he was 51, when his first novel, Post Office, was published.

11. Bram Stoker, who is now best known for writing Dracula,  published his first novel when he was 50. He published Dracula seven years later.

12. Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Shipping News didn’t publish her first first novel Postcards till she was 57.

13. Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s short stories were published widely in magazines but it wasn’t till she was 57 that her first book Everglades: River of Grass was published.  The first sentence of that book now welcomes visitors to the Everglades National Park.

14. Bonnie Garmus was 64 when she published her debut book, Lessons In Chemistry, which went on to be a bestselling novel and a highly regarded television show.

Third drafts? No-one told us about third drafts!

If you’re a newbie writer ploughing through the first draft of your first novel, the idea of a third draft may cause you no end of dismay. “When,” you may ask yourself, “will this thing ever be finished?”

The optimistic answer — at least according to Matt Bell and Stuart Horwitz — is you’ll get that sucker over the finish line in three drafts. The actual answer, as in so many things in this writing game, is “it depends.” I know a writer whose first novel went through twelve drafts before it was published. Some take 20 or more drafts to complete (shelve those in the horror section of the bookstore). And Hemingway famously wrote 39 alternative endings for “A Farewell to Arms.”

The inevitability of three drafts

So, let’s make a compromise between realism and honesty and say that, in all probability, you’ll write at least three drafts before you go to print.

What differentiates these drafts? Popular wisdom has it that the first draft is a messy “let’s get ’er done” draft. It’s sometimes likened to framing a new house, and it’s no time to be a prose perfectionist. As the author Barbara Davis said: “Stop trying to put lipstick on a skeleton.” 

The second draft, according to Horwitz, is the “Method” draft where you pay more attention to plotting, character development, and structure. Call it the Plotty McPlotface draft.

Enter the third draft. It’s been described in many different ways. Horwitz calls it the “Polished” draft. To M. L. Davis, it’s adding “Layers, layers, wonderful layers!,” and Tiffany Reisz tells us it’s “where the magic happens.” Most writers and editors agree that you’ll benefit from some external feedback before writing that third draft.

You don’t know what you don’t know

All of which is great, but there’s a flaw in this torrent of advice, especially when the advice peddles a three-draft or five-draft “system.” And it’s this: If you’re a newbie writer, you don’t know in advance how to treat these various drafts. You’re just trying to get through draft number one. Second and third drafts are undiscovered countries.

I know because I’ve been there.

Lacking an MFA or any previous instruction in the art of fiction, I wrote the first draft of my work in progress just to see if I could do it. In my second draft, I set out to tighten up the plot and reduce the gargantuan word count. Problem was, while I succeeded in cutting 18,000 old words, I ended up adding 15,000 new ones.

So, I did something right and commissioned a manuscript evaluation from a good editor. Her input provided me with a cold dose of plot and character reality together with a manuscript-wide to do list for—roll of drums—my third draft.

What’s it like in there?

How could I follow my editor’s advice and remain fully engaged in my third draft?

After all, by this time I’d read the whole manuscript twice, and some sections four or five times. To get through that third draft, I needed to shake something loose. Otherwise, things promised to get really boring just as I needed to get enthusiastic about “polishing.”

Here are a few strategies I’ve tried in my quest to be unboring and “make the magic happen.”

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is more than just sitting on your duff cogitating about things. It’s a large set of techniques to help you think through tough problems and get creative. I’ve used several of these, including “Five Whys,” “Change Something Big,” and “Mind-mapping.”

Five Whys (or 5Y) is useful for getting to the bottom of why a given plot device doesn’t work. You ask a question: “Why are my clues weak and unconvincing?” Then you answer it: “Because they’re hidden in a random piece of wedding cake.” That answer prompts the next question, say, “Why did character A hide them I wedding cake?” The theory is that after five questions and answers you’ll have drilled down to the root of your problem. You’ll still have to solve your problem, but you’ll have a framework for doing so.

Change something big is basically free ideating at a grand scale. Ask yourself “What would happen if the apparent villain was really the good guy?” “What if my bad-ass intergalactic mercenary was your narrator’s granny?” You may or may not pursue these ideas, but if you generate enough of them you’ll maybe find a nugget among the rusted nuts and bolts.

In ”Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative,” Chuck Wendig gives us a variation of the mind map: the Relationship Web (p.172). You write down your character’s names and draw arrows one to the other, indicating the nature of their relationships or the types of feelings they have for each other. Feelings have consequences, and the web may suggest what those consequences will be. 

Rewrite opening chapters

A writing mentor suggested doing this, and I don’t know whether to thank him or strangle him. Basically, write different versions of your opening to experiment with cutting words, changing points of view, or changing the emphasis that you place on character relationships. I wrote four—count ’em—four different versions of my prologue and Chapter 1. It’s almost universally accepted that you should start your story as late as possible, and avoid excessive exposition. I tackled my four rewrites in this spirit. Along the way I learned a few things about my characters, their place in the plot, and about writing craft.

A word of caution, though. If you rewrite your whole novel like that, you’ll hit retirement age before you’re finished.

Excel at book maps

Do you need a big picture overview of that second draft? Make a book map that depicts chapters, characters, plot points, and plot holes in one big cathedral of book architecture.

You can do a book map on paper (see below), but if you like spreadsheets, a book map in Excel offers great flexibility, once you’ve done the work to set it up. Because my second draft is so long, I’m obsessed with word counts, so I incorporated columns for word counts broken down by chapter and scene. Word to the wise; if you want to do that, you’d be well advised to use Microsoft Word heading styles for your chapters and scenes. Then you have the potential to use a macro to count the words in your chapters simultaneously. There’s a usable macro example here.

Big bits of paper

I love big pieces of paper! I’m talking about those three-foot pads of newsprint some people use in presentations. You can certainly use these for book mapping, but I think they come into their own when you’re brainstorming ideas. I’ve used felt pens, crayons, and pencils and erasers to work through third-draft problems from micro (genealogy of characters) to macro (how do I make antagonists/villains more relevant).

Last words

It’s tempting to say that “Happy first drafts are all alike, but unhappy third drafts are each unhappy in their own way.” Perhaps that third draft really will be “where the magic happens.” But if you’re more like me, you’ll be thrashing around, brainstorming solutions, and rewriting to shake something loose. The important thing, in my opinion, is to find ways to recover that joy of fresh creation you had when you started in on draft number one. Hopefully, some of these techniques will help.

Bio: Over a longish life, Andrew Park has worked as a stable hand, illustrator, factory worker, field biologist, development volunteer, and—most recently—as a professor of ecology. He holds an editing certificate from Simon Fraser University and maintains an active freelance editing practice. When not recreating in the Gatineau Hills around his home, he continues the lexical labour of producing the third draft of his novel. You can find him at www.wordfishereditorial.com.