Penguin Books opportunity

Getting published

The Monthly Catch

The General Publishing team at Penguin Group (Australia) is keen and excited to read new work from Australian authors, and as such we’ve developed the Monthly Catch. For the first week of every month, we throw our doors open to unsolicited manuscripts. In this time period (the 1^st to the 7^th of every month), please send through submissions based on the guidelines below.

We are only accepting submissions electronically – all hardcopy submissions will be recycled. And we are only accepting submissions in the first week of every month; anything that comes through outside of this time will not be considered.

When you send through your submission, you’ll receive an automatic email acknowledging receipt. All manuscripts are carefully read and assessed, but we can only respond to those who are successful. If we do not contact you within three months of submission, please assume that we have decided not to pursue your manuscript. No further correspondence will be entered into.

We are not currently considering poetry, educational textbooks or plays/scripts. For books for children and young adults, please see the separate submissions instructions below.

Attach your manuscript and a short synopsis (of no more than 300 words) as separate Word documents and send via email tomonthly.catch@au.penguingroup.com.

In the subject line of your email, please state the title of your book, whether your book is fiction or non-fiction, and then genre (eg Heiress in Love: Fiction/Romance or The Address Book: Non-Fiction/Memoir).

Please include in the body of your email the following information:

• Title.
• Brief summary (two or three sentences).
• Brief author bio (two or three sentences).

• Any previous publishing history and/or any writing awards you’ve received.
• Where would your book sit in the marketplace – i.e. what books would you see as comparison titles to yours, what authors are similar to you, who is the intended audience for your book, etc.
• Has this proposal been sent to other publishers?
• Have you previously submitted this, or a similar, proposal to Penguin? If so, please give details.

Writing advice from Jennifer Egan (winner 2011 Pulitzer prize for fiction)

Inspiration:
I don’t really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That’s what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.

Process:
-Start with a time and a place
-Be excited/surprised by the process
-Avoid going backward instead of forward (so simple, and yet, so unyieldingly difficult).
-Start with as little as possible
Fiction-writing I only do by hand. Only.

Output:
I usually try to write five to seven original pages a day.

First drafts:
A first draft takes about 10% of the total writing time, but in terms of importance it’s probably 50%.

Outlining:
I don’t outline initially. I outline everything in revision. Some of my revision outlines are 50 pages long.

Revision:
Usually my books go through three or four big drafts, with each big draft reflecting 20 rewrites of each individual part. When I get to a full new draft, it means I’ve made enough changes to all the parts that I’m willing to look at it as a whole.

Writer’s Block:
I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn’t have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.

Advice for young writers:
My advice is so basic. Number one: Read. I feel like it’s amazing how many people I know who want to be writers who don’t really read. I’m not convinced someone wants to be a writer if they don’t read. I don’t think the problem is that they need to read more; I think they might need to readjust their life goals. Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work. To be reading good things. I feel that you should be reading what you want to write. Nothing less.

The second thing is, I feel like getting in the habit of it is huge. I guess that was my one accomplishment of those two years [with the first failed novel]— making it a routine is a gigantic part of it.

One corollary of that—and this is probably the most important thing for me— is being willing to write really badly. It won’t hurt you to do that. I think there is this fear of writing badly, something primal about it, like: “This bad stuff is coming out of me…” Forget it! Let it float away and the good stuff follows. For me, the bad beginning is just something to build on. It’s no big deal. You have to give yourself permission to do that because you can’t expect to write regularly and always write well. That’s when people get into the habit of waiting for the good moments, and that is where I think writer’s block comes from. Like: It’s not happening. Well, maybe good writing isn’t happening, but let some bad writing happen. Let it happen!

I mean, when I was writing The Keep, my writing was so terrible. It was God-awful. My working title for that first draft was, A Short Bad Novel. I thought: “How can I disappoint?”

So, just write and be happy that you did it. You stuck to the routine. You’re kind of holding the place so that you’re present for when something good is ready to come.

And then it’s all about rewriting. Re-visiting, re-visiting and re-writing. I think it’s a mistake to be too precious about one’s words. I feel the same way about the criticism. You’re not going to break! It’s pretty tough to stick it out, to do this. So, get used to it! People are going to not like it. Okay! You’ll live. So, it’s bad. Okay. You’ll live! They said ‘no.’ You know what? Everyone gets said ‘no’ to a thousand times. If that is really something that you can’t tolerate, this may not work.

Read the complete interviews:

Egan on Goon Squad, LA Times brouhaha, and her next novel—Entertainment Weekly
How Do you Write a Great Work of Fiction?—The Wall Street Journal
Jennifer Egan Wins Award; Gives Me Advice—The Rumpus
Jennifer Egan—Days of Yore