Living Water - Dissertations - Songwriting - Part 12

There are some ideas to consider when you're looking for a publisher. The prime one is to try to establish a match between your composition and the publisher's catalog. For instance, Lillenas anthems tend to be a little easier for the singers and accompanist, and stylistically are on the conservative side. Schirmer has a well-established bent toward purely classical music. Word has heavy leanings to the contemporary side. Alexandria House is somewhere between Lillenas and Word. Picking the right publisher will improve your chances substantially.

Small publishers can be good choices because they don't necessarily have the wherewithal to procure the services of the big guns in the industry. Because of this, then, they need to call on lesser-known people - that's you and me! You can obtain a list of publishers from the Church Music Publisher's Association, P.O. Box 158992, Nashville, Tennessee 37215 (send $2.00 and an SASE, requesting their list of Church Music Copyright Holders).

Send a tape of your piece with [a copy of] your manuscript. It's much quicker for the person who reviews your music if he/she can pop a tape into a cassette player and hear it. Remember, people in general make life easy for those who make life easy for them, and publishers are no exception. A good point which Brad Schield made concerning the quality of your tape is that it reflects the amount of care you take in your composing endeavors - make it the best you can!

Send your composition to more than one publisher at once. It takes about a month for someone to review a package, presumably because of existing backlog, so you might as well wait for only one month for a bunch of people simultaneously than to wait for each one singly. I know that some publishers don't really want to review something which someone else is reviewing, but the practical consideration is that if you write something so good that more than one publisher wants it, then take the first offer you get and tell the other publisher that you've decided to decline his offer (without saying why). If this sounds rude and crass, I should tell you that this is advice I received from Fred Bock... his rationale is that life is too short!

Don't forget your return envelope (with postage) unless you don't care about getting your music back. Some publishers will return it anyway, but postal rates are so high that there aren't many who will do this.

Do bear in mind that even if you're writing great songs, having one published is largely a result of being in the right place at the right time (colloquialism: "dumb luck;" doctrinal orthodoxy: "fortuitous predestination"). It has to be a match between a submission to a publisher and a need to fill in the publishing schedule, or at least finding someone who's willing to put in a good word to encourage the publisher to take that chance on your behalf.

One more word: this is not an impossible dream! As I wrote earlier, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Fred Bock a couple of summers ago. It was a great learning experience. At his workshop, we had the opportunity to share our compositions with each other: I played a tape of "Praise His Name Forevermore," which has been done at Valley Church three times (SSA, SATB, and trumpet trio), and got a lot of good feedback. Fred said that it was a lot better than most stuff that crosses his desk.

This motivated me to assemble a package for Fred a couple of weeks later. I sent it and waited for word. One month passed... two months... and finally, Fred sent a letter back explaining that he hadn't had a lot of time to review music, and that he was finally getting around to it and that he was interested in publishing not just one, but two of the pieces I'd sent - PTL! I signed the contracts, and was hoping that the pieces would be released in 1992, but the recession forced Fred to reduce his publication list - and my pieces were two of the amputees. C'est la vie...