Purple Manuscripts, Genre Ignorance, and Other Pieces of Stephanie Morrill’s Journey Of Getting Published

Like Shannon mentioned on Friday in her “In 10 years, I’ll be writing…” exercise, this week all three of us are sharing our individual publication stories.

I knew I wanted to be a writer from first grade on, and as I grew up, I was always writing bits of stories. Usually they involved horses or band members from New Kids On The Block. But it wasn’t until high school that I began to get really serious about writing:

My junior year, I wrote a story from beginning to end. It was probably about 30,000 words, but I didn’t know that word count mattered. Or that there was a genre for young adult fiction. (I was so ignorant, I was pretty sure I had just invented a new genre.)

What I knew was that my book had chapters, I had edited it to the best of my abilities, and I was really proud of myself. I was sure it was time for me to be published.

This was in 2000, well before ebooks and the indie publishing revolution. For which I’m thankful, because I know I was impatient enough to design a cover in Word and slap it up on Amazon.

There weren’t even blogs that told you how to get published, but there were websites. So I got on publishers’ websites, found their addresses, and then I printed out my manuscript and sent it to them.

I even printed it out on purple paper so that it would stand out. (Here’s a video on how a manuscript should be formatted.)

When I never heard back, I started to do more than just dig up addresses. I started to actually read instructions, and I learned all these new vocab words. Like how to correctly query. And that big publishers didn’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. Unless my manuscript was submitted through a literary agent, it would go to a slush pile, and the chances of it being read were slim.

I started looking for publishers who accepted unsolicited manuscripts and found there were a few, none of whom I had never heard of. I figured that publishers were more or less equal. (Um, no…)

I sent out another batch of purple manuscripts, and this time somebody wrote me back. Not only that, but they had actually read the book. The longer I’m in this industry, the more I’m convinced that this was the grace of God breaking through. Honestly, they should have taken one look at the purple paper and recycled it.

The feedback they offered was that my book was good for my age, and that it lacked a satisfying ending.

I knew that both of those were true. I stopped sending the book out—I didn’t care enough to fix the ending—and I started working on other manuscripts.

Once I had graduated and had a bit more time on my hands, I started researching the idea of getting a literary agent. I read that you should make a list of the agents you were interested in, and then send letters out five at a time. That’s what I did, and I actually had 3 out of 5 agents request the first few chapters and a synopsis. (Insert frantic scrambling to figure out what in the heck a synopsis was.)

The agents all rejected me after reading the chapters, and I lost my confidence in the story and walked away from it. Which was a good choice, honestly. I still believe there’s a lot of value in quitting manuscripts.

I was learning that publication was harder than I thought it was. That I wasn’t really sure what genre I wrote. My stories were all about teens, but I thought I might outgrow that. I wanted to write serious novels, like the kind you would study in English class. I didn’t have any ideas for those, though. Maybe I should go to college…? Maybe I should try to write for TV…? Maybe I should become a literary agent…?

When I wasn’t at my full time job, I spent a lot of time writing. I wrote fan fiction, screenplays, stories I wanted to write, and stories I thought I should want to write.

I drove a stake into the ground and decided that YA fiction was my genre, The online world had become more social. I found writer specific email loops, forums, and writing organizations (like American Christian Fiction Writers or Romance Writers of America) that I could join.

And I married a really supportive man, which is critical to my publication story. My desk took up about half the living room of our first apartment. It was there that I started writing what was going to become my first published novel, Me, Just Different.

When Ben got his first job out of college and it was enough to support us, we decided that I wasn’t going to look for a job. Ben suggested that instead I could treat writing like it was my full time work, so I was fortunate enough to write 40+ hours a week for two years before we had kids. The combination of his belief in me and the time and space to write consistently made a huge difference in my growth.

On paper, I had achieved my goal. I had an agent. I was published, or at least contracted.