Hi, Hannah,
Thanks for posting.
I can’t tell you how to get published, but I can tell you what worked for me. It was simple, really. I prepared my manuscript in a professional manner — long enough to be a real novel, typed, double-spaced, white paper, one side of the page only, no spelling errors, proper grammar and punctuation, and sent it to a publisher. They liked it, and published it, and that’s how I got started. It became a bestseller because people were interested in it and bought it — nothing I could do had any influence on that! The book has to sell itself.
So you can see that getting published depends on whether or not the editors like your story. If you do send it to a publisher, make sure it’s “clean copy,” meaning no spelling errors, proper paragraphs, etc. If it’s not, they simply won’t read it or consider it at all.
Be patient. Finishing a book so that you yourself are satisfied with it takes a lot of time and a lot of work.
Good luck, Hannah!
—-Gordon Korman—-