It’s about time for me to open up Tyrus Books for submissions. As faithful readers of this blog know, I had to close things down a few months ago because my plate was full of other things—forecasting, promotional planning for titles coming out this spring, a few secret projects, and some web development. All of those things were necessary (and continue to be necessary) to run a for real business (a skill for which I have no proper training other than experience).

But you know what else is necessary? Books. In particular,good books. Great books. Life changing bunches of words gathered on paper or electronically or surgically implanted into your brain cortex box. And that means, like a pig on a truffle hunt, I’ve got to go out and root around in the dirt to find some. That’s my job, yes. It’s also one of the things that matters most in life to me.

We can all sit back and lament the dying of a golden age of publishing and pretend like things were more prestigious fifty years ago, or that there was an inherent current of geniusfloating around publishing when it was ruled by old dudes in tweed jackets.

The fact is, we’re all connected in new ways, bigger, bolder, faster, sometimes scary, sometimes revelatory ways that Ebenezer Von Bookguy couldn’t have imagined even after his trip to a (then legal) opium den on the upper Westside of Manhattan. Our interests can be piqued by American outposts that aren’t so distant anymore and we can get the real story by the folks living it, as opposed to the imagined story by people who haven’t experienced it. Do you know what this means? Do you realize how it can fix the problem facing all of us?

That’s right, it can raise the level of understanding among the whole of the planet. The 90 year old great grandmother in Des Moines can nod along to the “hey, we’re all human” typings of a Mormon kid in Salt Lake City or a swamp rat along the banks of the Apalachicola River in my spiritual hometown of Wewahitchka, Florida. And this thing doesn’t stop at any border, because it doesn’t have to, it can beam on an arc all around the globe stopping in London or Tehran, Paris or Damascus, Moscow or Beijing or Nairobi.

Novel writing is not singularly the domain of folks who have done six years of college and who received their MFA in Creative Writing. It’s about finding the truth to life, articulating it in an honest and compelling way, and letting the universe take it from there. We can, in the course of hearing another’s story, excuse imperfect grammar and discarded literary conventions, as long as the story means something.

Tips for querying a publisher:

• Don’t announce yourself as the “next BIG NAME AUTHOR” in your query letter. That isn’t a decision you make. The reading public will let you know. Also, to that same point, don’t talk about how BIG NAME AUTHOR can’t write a book to save his life and you don’t understand why anybody buys his books. You don’t need to understand, you just need to know that people do.

• Don’t make some ridiculous claim that you’re a “surefire New York Times bestseller” in waiting. The metrics for the NYT’s list are mysterious and driven by a lot of factors. It’s not in your control or even in your publisher’s control whether or not you’ll make the list. Consumers and readers make it happen, and you can’t control them either.

• Not all reviews are created equal. Ok, so check this out, some of you might have read that and been like, “Ben, you’re buying into the old hierarchy of dynamic media and its hold on the myth of blah blah…” Here’s the truth—reviews are good for a few things. Primarily, I note, they help feed an author’s self-esteem (sometimes in negative directions) AND they give awareness of a book to the reader of the review. A glowing five snowflake review of a book on a blog nobody reads is great for column A (author self-esteem) but does little for column B (raising public awareness of a book). A review in a publication with wider circulation does much more for column B and ultimately column B sells books. If that publication is geared towards publishing industry professionals (bookstore owners, librarians, etc.), say in a magazine like Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus, or Booklist, all the better.

• Don’t do that parlor trick where you pretend to be a big fan of the publishing house and you say, “I consider my works to be like two of your authors JOHNNY STORYTELLER and PEGGY BOOKWRITER” whereas JOHNNY STORYTELLER and PEGGY BOOKWRITER have very little in common with each other. It is a highly transparent move. If you’re a legit fan of one of the house’s authors, great, say what you like about him/her. But don’t just grab two names and say, “Hey, the three of us could be Peter, Paul, and Mary! Because there are three of us!” I know it says to do that in some guides, but don’t listen to those guides.

• Realize that the other person on the other end of your query letter is looking to get really excited about projects that move her. Your book might be great, but it might not speak to the editor, and the editor, without question, has a better handle on what is going to get her excited, how a project fits into the editorial niche of the publishing house, and whether or not she wants to acquire the title. If she doesn’t want to acquire it, try to refrain from the “You’re an idiot! I’m the next Stephen Grisham Rowling! You just passed up the opportunity to make $$$!” Because that won’t help your cause. Besides, if that’s the way you’re approaching the intersection of art and business, it will end in a wreck every time. I swear to you.

• If you’ve self-published the book you’re now querying about and then decided that self-publishing wasn’t as easy as some people told you it was going to be, be up front about that. Some publishing houses will still look. Others won’t. That’s their call to make. Pretending the self-published version doesn’t exist and being all, “Oh,that? Yeah, uh, I, uh, printed like three copies for my friends to let them see it, but it’s not publishedpublished,” is a smidge disingenuous. PRO-TIP, if you publish three copies for your friends, don’t assign an ISBN to the book.

This post originally appeared on the blog, “Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room.”