7 Ways To Get Your First Book Published

Getting your first book into print takes commitment, focus, a huge amount of luck and a social-media presence. By VanessaRaphaely, whose debut novel, Plus One an entertaining page-turner about the dark underbelly of the glamorous worlds of celebrity, womens media and film was published by Pan Macmillan South Africa in September

- Vanessa Raphaely

It was a humbling shock to my ego when my publisher let slip the planned size of the first print run for my novel, Plus One. A clue: it was not very big.

Writers, of course, do not write books to get rich. We write, it seems, because we have stories just bursting to get out onto a page. We write for the joy of storytelling and the massive sense of achievement of typing ‘The End’ after 75 000 words, which have appeared as a result of what feels like just as many hours of blood, sweat and rewriting. We write, because seeing our name on an actual novel has been on our bucket list since we first wrote a composition in primary school. We write because we always secretly knew we had a book in us, whatever our primary school teachers said.

But writing the book is only the start. How do you get your novel published? There’s no foolproof method. Even the great JK Rowling suffered many rejections (publishers aren’t foolproof), but these tips might help.

1) This is a tough one: Make sure your manuscript is good.