You’ve just finished a novel. Maybe you wrote it as part of November’s National Novel Writing Month. Either way, you’ve got this first draft happily sitting there and you’re wondering… what happens next?

Here’s what you don’t do next. You don’t send it out to agents and publishers. Not yet, anyway.

And yet, even as I say this to you, thousands of people send their very first draft out to agents the minute they finish it. Agents have come to dread the beginning of December because they get buried in this mess of unedited work.

Maybe that sounds harsh but it’s advice you’ll see absolutely everywhere. No agent or publisher wants to see your first draft and, by sending out your roughest work, you’re damaging your chances of publishing in the future. You have a ton of work to do before you’re ready to submit your novel to agents and publishers so do yourself (and your writing career as a whole) a massive favor and resist the urge to show off your baby until it’s matured a bit through editing and extensive revision.

It’s hard enough to get published anyway. Why would you want to try with anything other than your very best work? Frankly, it’s both a waste of time (for both you and for the poor agents and editors that have to read your first draft) and can be damaging to your future writing aspirations.

And while we’re on this topic, this doesn’t mean that you should start querying or searching for agents either. You aren’t ready to query agents until you’ve got a 100% complete and heavily polished work for them.

But rather than focus on the negative, stay tuned for lots of posts over the next few weeks on what you *should* do next regardless of your publication plans.