Helpline
Your writing problems solved with advice from Diana Cambridge
Diana Cambridge
Email your queries to Diana (please include home-town details) at: diana@dianacambridge.co.uk or send them to: Helpline, Writing Magazine, Warners Group Publications plc, 5th Floor, 31-32 Park Row, Leeds LS1 5JD. She will answer as many letters as she can on the page, but regrets that she cannot enter into individual correspondence. Publication of answers may take several months. Helpline cannot personally answer queries such as where to offer work, or comment on manuscripts, which you are asked not to send.
QJust how long does one wait to hear back from mainstream publishers – not those who publish if you pay them? I sent my novel to three different well known publishers six months ago, and have not heard a thing. Is there a set time which, after that has passed, one assumes that one has got nowhere?
TOBY RICHARDS
Mumbles, Swansea
AAll publishers have an enormous pile of work sent to them: they can never catch up. But ensure that you’re sending your work to the right publisher: one who deals in exactly your genre and subject. There are writers who, for example, send Victorian love stories to publishers who only deal in futuristic sci-fi – and so on. Check the exact guidelines in Writers & Artists Yearbook. Also, always have more than one project out there – if you become fixated on a single piece of work, each day that passes with no word from the publisher will make you more depressed. Increase your productivity and lower your expectations of hearing back quickly. A few months is nothing in the publishing world – but some publishers will tell you, in their guidelines, just how long you should be waiting.