What makes an author successful? For me, it is for a traditional publisher to take up the rights on my manuscript. Anyone can self-publish, if they have enough money, but there’s just something about getting the validation of a real publisher and seeing your own creativity out there in bookshops for people to buy.

Last year, I had the opportunity to pitch my manuscript, written through the Australian Writers’ Centre’s Write Your Novel course, to a traditional publisher. I totally flubbed the whole experience, including, in hindsight, the content of the written pitch sent with the manuscript to refresh the publisher’s memory. Nevertheless, I waited with baited breath for my manuscript to be either accepted or rejected. I waited for the next five months. The outcome was a polite, ‘thanks, but no thanks. It’s not the genre we’re accepting at the moment.’

Meanwhile, I got stuck into crafting my second book—a sequel to the first. I’m a slow and meticulous planner-writer, so after all the plotting and planning and continual researching of facts such as, ‘was it 2015 that MH370 got lost?’ (FYI no, it was 2014), I didn’t really sit down and start writing the narrative till about two months ago. So far, there are twenty-five thousand or so words, many of which may go to ground with redrafting and redrafting and redrafting …

And now I have this rejected manuscript to try and pitch to another publisher, except none of the ‘biggies’ which accept literary fiction are accepting submissions at the moment, so it’s time to get my act together so I can nail the next pitch. Maybe to an agent? I need to get passionate about it again.

Having been a teacher, I tend to be reflective, so I sat and thought about what might have been the cause of the rejection. I KNOW it’s a rip-snorter of a tale and it ticks all the right structural and character-development-arc boxes. Unfortunately the reflective thinking tended to happen in the 3am-6am timeslot when it wasn’t really productive. But some ideas did come out of it and actually stuck in my head till the morning:

What if I were to stop internalising rejection as a proclamation of my value as an author—stopped trying to deserve a ‘yes’ as a person—and tried to get the publishers interested in buying the manuscript on its merits without bringing myself into it? I’d be sure to get a better sleep after an unsuccessful pitch. It sounds simple and obvious, right? It’s not the ‘what’, but the ‘how’.

I’ve been to several writers ‘festivals’ and numerous ‘author talks’ where successful authors plugged their books and talked about themselves and signed crisp, freshly printed books for adoring fans. I’ve also scrolled through numerous free ‘how to pitch’ pages and YouTubes and I worked through the AWC’s ‘Pitching and Publishing’ course, but totally missed the forest for the trees. I’d always imagined the authors I watched on panels and listened to in interviews were wildly sure of themselves from the get-go and that they’d hit ‘send’ with steady hands when pitching, but I bet they don’t.

‘Sell your story with confidence,’ most of them advocated. It’s a deeply unhelpful piece of advice for a quivering piece of jelly such as myself. My particular baggage is to try and convince publishers I (not my product) am worthy. I pre-rejected myself in that pitching session and subconsciously called it humility, but mostly, it was just self-protection. If you read my book, The Gaslight Dinning Room [working title] when (not ‘if’) it is published, you’ll get an inkling as to why I’m like that. Hope that’s tantalising!

I was ‘managing’ the comfort of everyone else in the zoomroom during my pitch; and my internal narrative had me stuck asking for the ‘yes’ and not being able to be the steward of my own work. It makes sense that if your internal script is, ‘I’m taking too much of this important person’s valuable time’, then your external communication is going to be rushed and tentative. When you feel small, you blur your own signal and can hide the true quality of your work. Many of my ‘colleagues’ ummed and aahed and read a prepared pitch. We’d struggled through a year of crafting our manuscripts together and several of them had done the lead-up courses with me as well, but none of us was confident.

I heard my husband say to someone a few weeks ago, ‘I’m a salesman. If someone’s selling ice to the Eskimos, I’ll sell them the freezer to put it in.’ I have ample opportunity to hear him doing, not exactly that, because that’s a metaphor (and a hyperbole) obviously, but being this ‘good salesman’, when he works from home. I’ve more than once been called ‘anal’. I take this to mean I analyse and am flattered. So, I listened to his conversations with the objective of analysing why he was such a good salesman when he is not a particularly confident person otherwise.

People who ring or chatbot him are not interested in him as a person. He articulates what they need to hear and gives them confidence rather than ‘performing’ worthiness to be doing the job. They aren’t there to hear him validate them (although sometimes he does in a manner of speaking after he hangs up, with a well-rounded volley of swearwords). They have a problem—they need a solution.

A publisher, far from being there to validate authors, is interested in hearing the value they bring to the publishing house. They have a ‘gap’ they need to fill and the dollar signs are scrolling in their eyes if you look closely as you pitch. You have to talk to keep those reels spinning. ie. they evaluate what the author tells them about the manuscript on the fit for what they need, timing and the taste of the potential audience (readers who will buy the book). They don’t give a flying feck about the author really, except to maybe ascertain whether s/he can work with an editor. This conceptual epiphany didn’t align in any way with my previous overall strategy.

What I hadn’t realised, and what no-one had said, is that pitching with clarity is more important than pitching with confidence. I wasn’t clear about what the book was because I was too busy being humble. I was clear on labelling the themes, the vibe and the target audience and agonised for days over articulating the genre as ‘contemporary fiction’, ‘tragicomedy’ or ‘auto fiction’. I’d prepared all that stuff. But I’d lived so long inside the book, that I could no longer say what the main character wanted, let alone what was standing in her way. ‘You mean, it’s literary fiction?’ the publisher asked me and I nodded. I’d been told that they weren’t interested in that and I just went to pieces.

Clarity doesn’t start with how the book feels. It starts with what actually happens. When you can articulate what happens on the page, the book stops feeling fragile and precious and falling into set categories, and starts to feel like something another person can experience alongside you. When pitching, you are simply orienting people you don’t know to your crafted product. You’re allowing them into your work and to make an informed choice about whether they’ll buy your product. Be clear on what you write and have written. You need to develop the ability to describe this ‘thing’ you made.

Once you’re aware of the language you’re using, internally and out loud, your pitching work becomes both easier and harder. Repeatedly, constantly you’ll have to choose clarity over comfort and self-respect over self-protection. Replace the epistemic modality—vocabulary that is tentative, such as ‘might’, ‘just’, ‘maybe’, ‘probably’ and ‘sorry’—and anything that asks permission to take up space with strong sentences and phrases that leave no doubt.

In future, I’m going to stop trying to be harmless enough to be chosen— to deserve the ‘yes’.

Apparently people who’ve tried to make a comment on my posts have been thwarted by some hidden algorithm. I can’t work out how to deconstruct it but I welcome constructive comments and disagreement on my public Facebook page under where I will have posted this link. Apparently I should break up the text with photos or graphics. Suggestions appreciated.