Advice for aspiring authors.

Someone on my friends list recently posted about possibly getting her book published, so I set off to find some good advice. I asked my mother, whose job it is to help writers in Western Australia with things like manuscript assessment, finding work and finding publishers. A few years ago, she was granted a Churchill Fellowship to tour the USA and investigate how publishing works there, as well.

One of the things she told me was that statistically, one in three people think they have a novel in them. Maybe this advice will be useful for the general public, too, so here's what I learned.

• Your unsolicited manuscript will end up on the slush pile, and probably never emerge.
• You can improve your chances of getting off the slush pile with research into the publisher, and a good, marketing-oriented covering letter.
• Don't be too proud to get insider help from friends, if at all possible.
• Your best bet is to get an agent interested in your manuscript.

The worst thing you can do is take your finished manuscript, slap on a covering letter, and mail it to all the publishers you can think of.

There's this thing commonly called the "slush pile". It's where your manuscript will end up if you mail it to a publisher. Manuscripts in the slush pile get read by a young recruit at the publishing house, straight out of college, whose job it is to look at the tens of thousands of unsolicited manuscripts, and recommend any good ones to someone higher up in the food chain. Common practice is for them to read the first four pages, or maybe the first chapter.

Two percent of novels in the slush pile get published. One in fifty. Look around and you can find stories of success, like the woman from South-West Western Australia who one day decided to write a Fantasy novel, and is now having it optioned in the USA for two million dollars. But they're exceptional stories. You don't hear about all the people whose really good manuscripts just sunk to the bottom of the pile.

One way to make a slush-pile manuscript more impressive is to pay good attention to the covering letter. Do research on each publisher you send it to. Your job is to convince the publisher that your book will sell, so you'll have to think marketing. Identify the target market of your novel. Who is likely to buy it? Think of putting in things like "Your company published foo last year, and it was number five on amazon.com for three weeks. This novel is similar to foo in these ways, but better, because of this and this."

Your best bet, though, is to try to avoid falling into the pile in the first place. If you have any contacts in publishing at all, use them. Know any writers or journalists who may have contacts in publishing? Call in favours. Beg. You're trying to get your manuscript to skip the pile, and get directly to someone who might be in a position to do something more with it than pass it to his or her superior.

The best piece of advice is to get an agent interested in your manuscript. Agents are more accessible than publishers, and if one gets interested in your writing, they have the contacts in the industry that you lack. If you're really serious about getting published, get an agent.