How to stop being an unpublished virgin in five easy steps

This headline is clickbait but it most likely got your attention

Seeing one’s name on a book cover seems to be a benchmark of some form of achievement. If I could be sincere, I’d recommend that you let go of this fantasy, because nothing really happens after you publish a book — no one really reads anything any more and all published words end up gathering dust somewhere. But since this is a premium post and nobody wants to pay just for sincerity, I’ll pen some advice to help you move from being an unpublished nobody to being a nobody with a book.

Jokes aside¹, I remember clearly the long years when I hadn’t published anything and how obscure the whole process seemed to me. If self-publishing is out of the equation for whatever the reason, how do you get your first book out? How do you get someone interested in your work to the point that they’ll want to publish it? How do you stand out in a sea of desperate and attention-hungry writers looking to get their books out and willing to fall much lower than you to achieve their goals? It took me several years of failed attempts to figure out the following five points. I hope you find them useful. Some seem obvious to me now, but I’ll leave them anyway in case they aren’t obvious to you².