Getting published is a difficult business. Fewer than one percent of submitted works are accepted for publication.

It is common to hear stories of aspiring authors who have worked for years with little to show for their efforts besides a stack of rejection letters. And many mistakenly believe that you need high connections to be noticed, and higher still to be published.

Sending out query letters can feel like repeatedly casting your fishing line into a pond and never catching anything. Perhaps, never even getting a nibble.

New authors get published all the time. New stories, articles, and novels are being sold every day. And every day other writers are pulling fat fish out of the same pond where your line is hanging.

How do you catch that fish? How do you make it into the top 1%? It’s not necessarily the color, style, or size of your bait. Rather, it’s more probably how you cast the line. It’s how you bait the hook.

In other words, writing a good novel has much less to do with the story you tell than the way you tell that story. Thus, writing a publishable work is not only a matter of finally hitting on a great idea. It is a matter of studying the works of published writers, seeking criticism of your work, and actively trying to write in styles with which you are not yet comfortable.

The combination of perseverance and dedication, in addition to humility and a willingness to change and grow will get your work into the top 1%.

There are too many fishermen, and the fish are becoming picky eaters.

The market is glutted with manuscripts, and only a limited number of books and stories are being published each year. The struggling economy has generated hordes of first-time authors adding their pet projects to the slush piles. At the same time, in order to save costs and streamline their businesses, many publishers are lowering the number and variety of books they publish each year (or even closing their doors for good).

Hypothetically, an agent might receive 15,000 query letters in a year. Of the 15,000 novels in question, only a few dozen might be accepted and forwarded to a publisher, with only 15 or so to be accepted by a publisher for printing. Thus, in this example, an author has only a 1 in 1,000 chance of being published.

Not great odds.

The good news is that manuscripts are not chosen at random. Thus, the odds cited above can be very misleading. To understand why these odds should not intimidate you as much as they might, let us simplify the numbers and assume an initial figure of only 1,000 novels (instead of 15,000).

In skimming through the hypothetical 1,000 competing novels, agents are very efficient at weeding out over 900 of the obviously poor submissions with less than a minute’s perusal of each query letter.

This first cut removes authors whose work lacks sufficient polish, grammar, and focus. The poor quality of these 900 works may be due to the author’s inexperience or inability to edit. Either way, the authors in this group lack the talent to either see or to fix faults in their written words.

How can an agent fairly make such a huge first cut based solely on a query letter? You will often hear about agents foolishly passing on best-sellers, and, sure, wonderful books can often be overlooked for years. However, for the vast majority of submissions, the initial cut is both accurate and justified.

The authors in this group usually betray themselves in the first few sentences of their query letter in terms of grammar, spelling, tone, or style. Perhaps, their sentences are overly convoluted, or their vocabulary is unnecessarily flamboyant, or their paragraphs lack any sense of rhythm. Agents immediately spot these weaknesses and think: “If this author can’t sustain one page of quality writing, how can he or she possibly do it for an entire book?”

[Editor’s Note: Thus, writing an excellent query letter is essential to your book’s success.]

Out of the final 100 submissions (the top 10%) in our example, about 80 are made up of adequate novels, good-but-not-great novels, and well-written-but-uninteresting novels.

Agents may request full or partial manuscripts for some of these works in order to see if the manuscripts live up to the glimmers of quality that the query letters promised.

If you have received a manuscript request, but heard nothing further, rejoice in the knowledge that you made it to the top 10% of submissions; that your work received a serious nibble (even though the fish did not bite hard enough to get hooked).

This is good news. It means that with further edits you may be able to polish your prose, re-write your dialogue in a crisper, more natural way, and re-structure elements of your plot for a better build and a more satisfying climax. Then the fish will be biting.

Out of our hypothetical 1,000 manuscripts, only 10 will be published (the top 1%).

But, if you consider that only the top 10% of novels submitted are of good to excellent quality, you will see that if you have a good novel, you are closer to a one in ten shot than one in 1,000.

If you are a dedicated writer with a well-crafted, well-edited story, you have an excellent chance of publication. And with perseverance and a willingness to learn and grow, you have an excellent chance to write and publish many well-crafted and well-edited works.

Happy fishing!