If you're looking for a nice hex or the full invocation of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. The Craft I'm referring to is the craft of writing. Now before you rush off, there is a fair bit of conjuring & sleight of hand involved, so this might be of interest after all...
First up, I'm not a big fan of giving advice on writing. Why? For starters, there are far more qualified people out there to give it than me. For example, Stephen King's On Writing is a pretty good option for popular fiction.
The other problem with advice is it tends to be very general. Yes, usually the core tenets, such as write what you know are helpful, but some clever individual always pops up to disprove the rule. So I'm not going to offer any advice on writing here.
However, I am happy to share my story of how I got my first novel published. I like stories. They're personal. Not generalised. And everyone seems to have a different one to tell about how their first novel got published. After hearing many authors share their stories over the years, I realised there wasn't one guaranteed path to success. There are many different paths. And they're all very hard.
Here's mine.
The story of Fivefold started with desire. You know those boozy dinner parties we've all been to where the conversation inevitably turns to "what would you really like to be doing with your life?" You know the ones I'm talking about. (Unless you're under 18, in which case I'm fairly confident they're somewhere in your future.) Well, I got sick of saying I'd like to write a novel. It was either put up or shut up.
Fivefold also started with an idea. Now this can be the tricky part. Good ideas generally don't present themselves every day. Sometimes ideas can turn up wearing really cool new clothes only for you to discover on closer inspection that everyone's already worn those threads out. My idea, the core idea of Fivefold, came to me in the latter part of 1994. It wasn't until much later that I did anything useful with it.
This is where we get to the hard bit. It's not enough to simply write a novel and then submit it to publishers. You'll probably need space and time away from it to see what needs to be improved. I certainly did. Fivefold underwent a number of major edits before it was accepted by Random House. Then it went through some more. A lot of work? You bet. Worth the effort? Well you, gentle reader, will ultimately decide.
So, time marched on. I fine-tuned Fivefold between submissions to agents and publishers, and wrote short stories in the spaces between. Why? At first, to develop a publishing history. However, short stories proved to be seductive. Their brevity forces the author to fit a whole lot of story into a little space.