Writing Tip: My Research

In the last tip, I encouraged you to do your research. To help demonstrate this point, I will explain my own research when searching for a publishing house to accept my non-fiction analysis of The Hunger Games series.

This is the home page for McFarland Publishing. Right on the home page there is New Releases and Bestsellers. These categories help give us authors an idea as to what the publishing house is currently interested in signing.

Through reading scholarship on The Hunger Games series, I discovered McFarland Publishing as they have published several scholarly collections on the subject. Knowing this, I visited their site. Going through their menu I saw the “Becoming An Author” tag and visited that page.

Be sure to thoroughly explore the website. Sometimes it is as easy as looking at a menu bar, sometimes you have to really search for information on submitting your work.

On that page I found everything that I needed to know about what McFarland was looking for, how they wanted it presented, and where.

     

Having researched this publishing house, I realized that I could send in a query letter even though I hadn’t started writing my book yet.

Through this research, I was able to better situate myself and my chances at getting published. I targeted my publishing house much like you would choose a target audience. When looking for a publishing house, you want to find someone who is already interested in what you do.

Happy Writing Everyone!

Feel free to drop my any questions about publishing in the comments. I don’t know everything, but I’ll do my best to provide answers.