Photo courtesy of Luigi Diamanti

Maria wrote to me with the following question:

Dear Cecelia,

I have written a Christian novel for children (middle graders), and I would greatly appreciate your advise on how to get commercially published. I am currently an unpublished author. My manuscript has been professionally edited, but I am new to the writing arena and don’t know much about how to get noticed by a publisher.
I’d appreciate any advice you can give me.

Maria, you’re off to a good start since you had your manuscript professionally edited. I did this for the FIRST TIME myself. Although I’m a commercially published novelist, and had to go through the editorial process with a publisher, I recently paid for editorial services on an unpublished manuscript and it improved my story a lot, and I’ll probably go through the same process with future manuscripts. I blogged about my experience briefly here.

From what I’ve heard, breaking into the YA market is harder than adult fiction. Why? I’ve heard that they don’t publish as many YA books as adult books. The first thing I’d do if I were you is go to a bookstore and see what publishers are publishing YA fiction. I’d then search for those publishers online to see what their submission guidelines are. Make sure your book would be a good fit for their YA imprint, though. You don’t want to send a sweet romantic YA novel to a publisher that appears to publish only YA suspense titles. You might also want to see which authors are published with the YA publisher that you’re targeting and see if they have any information on their website/blog about how they got published, or contact them to see what they say.

Find out if the publishers that you want to target will be attending any writers conferences. If they are, you might want to go and meet the editor to see if they may be interested in your story. Having a personal connection with the editor helps when you’re submitting your manuscript.

Also, pray about it! 🙂 Ask God to help you find a home for your work and listen and weigh the advice from other writers! Also, join a writers group in your area. Look online to see if there are any groups that specialize in YA fiction – or just fiction. The two groups that have helped me are Romance Writers of America and American Christian Fiction Writers. Being part of a professional organization can help put you in contact with published novelists, editors, and agents!

Hope my information helps!

~Cecelia Dowdy~