How to get published worldwide by a Top 5 publishing house

Note: This is a long post but if youve 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.

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

But as I got more and more immersed in meditation, I truly started believing in the idea of mans 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 publishedfrom a top publishing house

What happened next?Sixty US literary agents rejected THE YOGA OF MAXS DISCONTENT (published in India asThe 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

houses and signed a worldwide book deal with Penguin Random Houses 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

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. Its great but wellwho cares? Youre in the slush-pile like everyone else.

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

propelling you to write and if you dont write it now, you wont be able to breathe any more. Without that life-or-death urgency, youll find it hard to have the resilience to stick through the gut-wrenching work and re-work thats inevitable in the pursuit of excellence.

So first off, lets de-bunk these three common myths on how to get published:

You need publishing industry contacts to get a book deal.Ive 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. Youre more likely to be

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 whove actually met the agents they were querying.

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 doesnt 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 thequality of the idea and writing. I advocate a completely different approach for writing your first

couple of drafts. Become a monk and switch off all technology and distraction, even take an extreme sabbatical if you can. Once youre finished writing, start building an authentic platform. A platform that publishers notice truly touches hundreds of readers lives and requires thought and work and cant be a slap-dash tweet here, status update there, kind of an affair

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 immediatelyopen windows to new worlds for them. In my case, for instance, 90% ofTHE YOGA OF MAXS DISCONTENTis set in hidden ashrams, Himalayan

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

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

Writing Lessons for getting a novel publishedYour book should crack a combination of ENTERTAINMENT and MEANING.

A top US literary agent like Mollie Glick, my literary agent, gets 100 queries inone 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. Thats a success rate of