Note: This is a long post but if you’ve ever wondered how to get published with no industry contacts, MFA or creative writing degree, this should answer almost every question.

2. How to get published
worldwide
by a Top 5 publishing house

4. Note: This is a long post but if you’ve ever
wondered how to get published with no industry
contacts, MFA or creative writing degree, this
should answer almost every question.
My first two novels(HarperCollins India: 2008, 2010)
sold 150,000 copies in India so my writing trajectory
seemed clear enough.

5. keep writing for my growing audience in India,
bask in the minor glory of giving commencement
speeches and speaking at literary festivals, and
win a couple of more Crossword and Indiaplaza
awards, all decent for a self-taught, average writer

6. But as I got more and more immersed in
meditation, I truly started believing in the idea of
man’s infinite potential. If I strove for excellence in
any sphere, I could become the best in the world
at it. So I committed to myself that my 3rd book
would be exceptional and the marker for that
would be getting a novel published from a top
publishing house

7. What happened next?
Sixty US literary agents rejected THE YOGA OF
MAX’S DISCONTENT (published in India as The
Seeker), my 3rd novel, after I finished writing it. I
re-wrote and re-wrote again after each rejection,
eventually getting book deals from three of the top
five US publishing

8. houses and signed a worldwide book deal with
Penguin Random House’s Riverhead imprint.
Through this eighteen-month journey of rejection
and dejection, I learnt exactly how to get
published with no publishing industry contacts,
MFA, or writing pedigree at all

9. You may argue my prior writing success in India
helped me but being a bestselling writer from India
is like being the #1 Australian rock band trying to
break into the global music industry. It’s great but
well…who cares? You’re in the slush-pile like
everyone else.

10. Just one thing before you read further.
The below approach is predicated on the fact that
you’re writing your Mona Lisa, that one book you
feel your whole existence is

11. propelling you to write and if you don’t write it now,
you won’t be able to breathe any more. Without that
life-or-death urgency, you’ll find it hard to have the
resilience to stick through the gut-wrenching work
and re-work that’s inevitable in the pursuit of
excellence.

12. So first off, let’s de-bunk these three
common myths on how to get
published:

13. You need publishing industry
contacts to get a book deal.
I’ve seen debut writers waste endless time
hanging out at writers’ conferences and minor
book readings hoping to schmooze with a
literary agent and “get discovered”. No one I
know has cracked a top publishing deal that
way. You’re more likely to be

14. picked up from the slush-pile if your query and
manuscript just jump off the page than have weak
referrals from known authors or mention your five-
second meeting with the agent at a random
conference. I approached top US agents cold with
my query and had a 40% request for a full
manuscript, about 4x higher on average than
writers who’ve actually met the agents they were
querying.

15. You need a “platform” to get published.
Another huge time killer. Posting random tweets
and Facebook updates and obsessively counting
the number of likes for each post doesn’t take you
even one step closer to a publishing deal. Every
agent and editor will tell you that debut fiction sells
first and foremost, on the quality of the idea and
writing. I advocate a completely different approach
for writing your first

16. couple of drafts. Become a monk and switch off all
technology and distraction, even take an extreme
sabbatical if you can. Once you’re finished writing,
start building an authentic platform. A platform that
publishers’ notice truly touches hundreds of
readers’ lives and requires thought and work and
can’t be a slap-dash tweet here, status update
there, kind of an affair

17. You need to write the great American
novel to get published in the US.
Almost all of the ten agents and publishers I
surveyed for this post prefer novels that
immediately open windows to new worlds for
them. In my case, for instance, 90% of THE YOGA
OF MAX’S DISCONTENT is set in hidden
ashrams, Himalayan

18. caves, and the dark underbelly of India, and that
part was much better received than the 10%
which was set in New York. You should write the
story you want to write, the more unique the better

19. Now, here are the six lessons I’ve learnt
on how to get published that will help
you come from nowhere and land a six-
figure worldwide book deal

20. Writing Lessons for getting a novel
published
Your book should crack a combination
of ENTERTAINMENT and MEANING.

21. A top US literary agent like Mollie Glick, my literary
agent, gets 100 queries in one day. Her assistants
sieve through them to draw her attention to say,
one out of those 100 manuscripts, then she
makes one or two representation offers every
month. That’s a success rate of <0.05%.
Then, publishers reject at similar rates. How do
you stand out with odds lower than winning

22. a Powerball lottery? Your novel has to jump out of
the pages by both entertaining at an epic
level and leaving a lingering effect on the reader. If
you only entertain, you’ll likely be rejected
because there are one thousand novelists with
existing audiences that are writing about blood
sucking vampires and serial killers. On the other
hand, the earlier drafts of THE YOGA

23. OF MAX’S DISCONTENT were rejected again
and again because I was trying too hard to
communicate yoga and meditation philosophy.
The moment I stopped treating my book as a PHD
thesis and played up the adventure aspect with
the hidden underbelly and secret ashrams of
India, the book was flooded with agent offers.

24. For ENTERTAINMENT, reveal a “secret
world” or a hidden society in your book.
Are you revealing a hidden new world about which
the reader knows nothing? Think of The Da Vinci
Code’s secret world of holy-grail seekers. Or Born
to Run with it hidden ultra runners. Or Harry Potter
and the school of wizards. Your book will

25. jump out among the hundreds of others about
dealing with the death of a loved one or the post-
modern angst of living in a big city or falling in love
in college if you open windows into a new
world for your reader instantaneously. You can
explore any secret world you are passionate
about. I did it with secret yoga ashrams in India.
Your story could be set among the Silicon

26. Valley elite or slumlords playing Russian Roulette
in Caracas, anything that gives you a shiver of
anticipation just hearing about it and makes you
want to research deep into it so that you create an
elaborate alternate reality, a fictive dream that
your reader can’t help but enter.

27. For MEANING, give your protagonist a
big, lofty, all-consuming goal.
At its best, fiction helps you experience a moment
of divinity by dissolving your sense of self
completely as you’re immersed in the new fictive
dream. You’re experiencing that dream through
the story’s protagonist so the protagonist’s goal
should be so big and all-important for them that
they—and the reader—are consumed completely
by it. Like Ahab chasing Moby Dick. Or

28. Gone Girl’s protagonist trying to outdo her
husband. Most debut novelists get rejected
because their protagonists’ goals are either too
common or lack urgency. In my earlier drafts, for
instance, Max, my protagonist was tired of the
emptiness of his life in New York and sought a
deeper meaning for his existence. Just read my
last sentence: how commonplace and vague it is.

29. Result: massive rejection. In subsequent drafts, I
brought Max’s violent past in the Bronx housing
projects to life in the pages, giving depth and
urgency of his meaning-of-life questions. Your
protagonist should have such an all-consuming,
urgent goal that the possibility of not getting it
NOW slashes her insides

30. Marketing Lessons for getting a novel
published
Use Professional editors to edit your
book before submission-the “2,2,2”
rule.

31. You’re competing with one hundred manuscripts
per day so your book needs to be completely
polished before it reaches the desk of a top
literary agent. As such, I highly recommend
professional editors to lift your writing from debut-
quality to expert-quality. This is the “2,2,2” rule that
worked for me: -Write two full drafts on your own. -

32. -Then, send it to a developmental editor for
strategic comments (story, structure, character
trajectory and other fundamental macro issues not
copy edits). Cost= $700. -Revise two more times
based on the development editor’s comments.

33. -Then, send it to a line editor for a full sentence-
by-sentence copy edit. Cost= $2300. -Revise two
more times based on the line editor’s comments
and submit your final manuscript to literary
agents.With this approach, I got a book
deal=$95,000 in US, Europe, and India (with more
foreign rights still being negotiated), an incredible
ROI on the $3,000 investment in editors.

34. Create your own hype
This is the exact query letter that got me a 40%
response for a full manuscript from agents, a very
healthy response rate when I compare it to the
10% or so average I’ve heard from other writers
who’ve had much more publishing experience
than me.

35. Email Subject: Query from #1 Bestselling Indian
Novelist: THE YOGA OF MAX’S DISCONTENT
Dearest X,
I was a #1 bestselling novelist in India in 2008
(Keep off the Grass, HarperCollins India) and
2010 (Johnny Gone down, HarperCollins India)
with 150,000+ copies of my novels in print.

36. novels have been optioned into films, currently in
different stages of development. I seek
representation for my 3rd novel, THE YOGA OF
MAX’S DISCONTENT (70,000 words, mainstream
fiction), my first novel targeted for a US audience.

37. About the novel: A violent encounter forces
Maximus Pzoras, a Harvard economist and Wall
Street banker, to confront questions about
suffering and mortality that have dogged him since
his mother’s death. His search for a mentor takes
him from Manhattan to the dark underbelly

38. of India to a near-fatal hike up the Himalayas and
finally, a small drought stricken village in South
India where strange things begin to happen to
him: he remembers past lives, he can levitate and
walk on water, do impossible Yoga poses and
glimpse future events. Max struggles

39. to overcome his rational skepticism and the love
of his family pulling him back home. In a final bid
for answers, he embarks on dangerous solitary
meditation in a freezing Himalayan cave. Will Max,
Wall Street banker turned Himalayan sage,
penetrate the truth of human suffering? Is
enlightenment just a new age illusion or an
accessible truth?

40. The YOGA OF MAX’S DISCONTENT is a
pulsating, contemporary take on the classic
human quest for transcendence, a Siddhartha for
our generation. I could think of no better agent to
represent my US debut given your stated passion
for culture-defining books that make a

41. difference in the world-exactly what I strove for in
my story, which is both a page-turning journey
through India and a journey of tremendous inner
transformation. I would be deeply obliged if you
could consider my query.
Thank you,
Karan

42. Note the first paragraph. I didn’t say “I’m a
published author in India.” I gave very specific,
compelling statistics that made my query and
subject line pop. You may argue that mine was a
unique case but look closely at your own
background—you’ll find

43. specific, tangible achievements you can use. For
example, if you had one short story published in
the New Delhi Literary journal, don’t do what 99%
of authors do and say:
“I’m a published writer with several short stories.”
Instead, try this harder hitting copy option:
-

44. “My most recent short story, published in the New
Delhi Literary Journal, was voted as the #1 short
story in a reader survey and was reviewed as “X’s
voice explodes with narrative force” by a
prominent critic.”

45. Immediately, perception shifts. And to enable a
claim like this, all you need to do is to conduct
your own reader survey testing story descriptions
from other stories in the New Delhi literary journal
on Survey Monkey for free. Be inventive. Create
your own hype. No one else will do it for you as a
debut novelist.

46. Build Scarcity into your pitch.
This is the follow-up letter I’d send to every
agent within ten days of sending my original
query.

47. Email Subject: FW: Query from #1 Bestselling
Indian Novelist: THE YOGA OF MAX’S
DISCONTENT
Dearest X,

48. No intention to hurry you whatsoever as I know it
takes more time to evaluate a query and I fully
respect your process.
I just wanted to keep you in the loop that two of
the agents I sent my first set of queries to
responded with a request for a full, somewhat
surprisingly for my understanding of the longer -

49. timelines in the US publishing process.
Since you were at the top of my desired list
because of your confluence of interests in
commercial fiction and religion/ spirituality, I was
really eager for your response. If at all your time
allows, I would be very grateful if you could tell me
of your interest.
Thank you,
Karan

50. I’d send this letter out to every agent the moment I
heard a vaguely positive response from another
agent. Note, the feeling of scarcity in this pitch.
Almost always, the agent I sent it to would review
the manuscript immediately, an exception in an
industry where it can take upto three months for
an agent to review a manuscript.

51. After I received an agent offer, I’d be even more
straightforward in my outreach to other agents.
Dearest X,

52. I wanted to let you know that things moved rather
quickly and I have received an agent
representation offer. I have requested a week
ending Monday, Aug 26, to make my decision.

53. As I stated in my very heartfelt query below, I’m
very interested in hearing from you so if your
time/interest permits, it would be great for me to
know your interest in reviewing the manuscript this
week.
Thank you,
Karan

54. Without this urgency, the agent has no motivation
to give you a priority over the hundreds of queries
in the slush-pile. Use similar scarcity triggers
anywhere you can in the process to speed up a
notoriously slow industry.
Use the above approach, first to write a great
novel, then to get a top US literary agent because
a top agent is the difference between

55. your manuscript languishing for months with an
intern at a publishing house vs. being sent to the
senior commissioning editor who has the
discretion to make an immediate offer (Mollie
Glick, my agent, got me multiple offers within nine
days of submitting my manuscript for perspective).
And you’re on your way to get a worldwide book
deal!

56. For more details
Visit us @
http://www.karanbajaj.com/