Jenny Milchman I wish I’d known just how polished and perfected a work has to be to get published traditionally. I was lucky enough to get kernels from industry pros that allowed me to go back and hone my craft... How long did it take you to get published? Here are my stats: 11 years, 8 novels, 3 agents, 15 almost-offers from editors . An almost-offer happens when an editor wishes to acquire a book, but gets turned down by her editorial board, or by people in the marketing or publicity departments, or even (as happened to me with my seventh novel) the publisher herself. My first published novel was the eighth one I wrote. And of course, there’s “long” in the non-numeric sense, too. It took an age, an epoch, forever. I thought I would never break through. Why did you hang in so long versus, for instance, self-publishing? When I started out, self-publishing as we now know it wasn’t an option. There was so-called vanity publishing, and it cost a chunk of ch...