Posted on - No Comments on Getting the feedback you need — and deserve

Getting the feedback you need — and deserve

Given that from now until after the last New Year’s hangover has receded into memory is a publishing world dead zone, a time of internal reassessment when query letters are seldom read, to be followed by the annual avalanche of New Year’s resolution query letters in January, now is a lovely time to take a break from querying. It’s a great time to be revising your own work with an eye to sending it out afresh to agents, editors, and conferences, to clear it of those little gaffes that make you smack yourself in the head when you catch them AFTER the submission’s in the mail.

It’s revision time, boys and girls.

This, I know, will make some of my long-term readers giggle. When, you may well be wondering, does Anne think it ISN’T a good time to revise a manuscript? Or, at the very least, to scan it for common mistakes and deviations from standard format?

Yes, yes, I am the high priestess of manuscript perfection, but as I find it a trifle difficult to believe that anyone who has been reading this blog for a while isn’t aware by now WHY I preach that particular gospel, I shan’t explain again. But I shall reiterate: it is absolutely vital to clear your manuscript (and query letter, and synopsis) of spelling and grammatical errors, pronto.

In this effort, DO NOT rely upon your word processing program’s spelling and grammar checker. As any professional editor will tell you, they tend to be rife with technical errors — mine, for instance, regularly tells me to use the wrong form of there, their, and they’re — and it’s far too easy for a slip of the mouse to convince your dictionary to accept “caseless” when you mean “ceaseless.”

Spell check, by all means, but I implore you, do not let that be your only means of proofreading. There is no substitute for the good ol’ human eye running down a printed page of text for catching errors.

Why not proof on your computer monitor? Because, as any editor will happily tell you, the screen is not the best place to proofread, even if you read every syllable aloud (which I recommend, particularly for novels that contain quite a bit of dialogue). It’s just too easy for the eyes and the brain to blur momentarily in the editing process, making you skip an error.

Yes, even if you have a simply massive computer screen — this is an instance where size truly doesn’t matter. Since I edit professionally, I have a monitor that could easily balance a small litter of puppies on it. But I ALWAYS use hard copy for a final edit, both for my work and for my clients’. As my downstairs neighbor would, I’m sure, be overjoyed to tell you, if a deadline is close, I’m going to be sitting in my library, reading the relevant manuscript in its entirety, in hard copy, out loud.

I’m funny that way.

After you have proofed and poked the slower movements of your text, I STRONGLY urge you to have at least one third party reader take a gander at the text. It is NOT the best idea in the world to be the only eyes who see your work before it lands on an agent’s or editor’s desk. Gaining some outside perspective, via a trustworthy first reader, has many benefits — most notably, good pre-submission feedback can enable you to weed out the rookie mistakes that tend to result in automatic turndowns from professionals. Like misspelling your own name or address on the title page — which happens more than you might think.

Hey, people are in a hurry.

Other than the simple fact that other eyes are more likely to catch mistakes than you are the 147th time you read a text, there is another reason that you should run your work by another human being before you submit them. I tremble to report this, but it is very, very common for writers to send off the first chapter or three of their novels WITHOUT EVER HAVING ANYONE ELSE READ THEM. The result: for many writers, the agent’s feedback is the first time many writers EVER get an outside opinion of their work.

And, as those of you who followed me through the November list of rejection reasons know, that feedback is usually either minimal or non-existent. Not, in any case, feedback that’s likely to help a writer improve his work before the next round of submissions.

Select wisely your first reader wisely, preferably another writer, rather than a friend, lover, or — sacre bleu! — a family member. Long-term readers, chant it along with me now: the input of your best friend, your mother, your siblings, and/or your lover (s), however charming it may be, is unlikely to yield the kind of concrete, tangible feedback every writer needs.

No offense to your kith and kin, but it’s true. Ties of affection do not necessarily good readers make.

Since holiday time is notorious for prompting one’s relatives to ask, “So, dear, how’s your writing coming? Published anything yet?” I thought this might be a good moment to remind you of this unfortunate fact. The closer the tie, the lower the objectivity — and no, smart people are not exempt from this rule. Even if your mother runs a major publishing house for a living, your brother is a high-flying agent, and your lover reviews major novelists regularly for THE WASHINGTON POST, they are unlikely to have the perspective necessary to give you objective feedback.

Nor should they have to, really. It’s their job to make you feel better about yourself — or to make you feel worse about yourself, depending upon your taste in relationships and familial patterns.

So when your Aunt Gladys says she’d just LOVE your manuscript (and trust me, at some point, she will; everyone likes the idea of getting a free advance peek at the next big bestseller), I give you my full permission to use me as your excuse for saying no. Do it politely, of course: “I’m sorry, but I’ve been advised by a professional editor that until I find an agent, I need to limit myself to objective readers,” or “I’d love to, Aunt Gladys, but I have a writing group for feedback — what I need you for is support!” tends to go over MUCH better than, “What, are you just trying to get out of buying a copy of the book?”

And for those of you who already have agents: break yourself of the habit NOW of promising free copies of your future books to your kith and kin. Since authors now receive so few copies — and are often expected to use those for promotion — it’s really, really common for the writer to end up having to BUY those promised freebies to distribute.

Get Aunt Gladys used to the idea that supporting you means being willing to shell out hard cash for your book. Promise to sign it for her instead.

But I digress. If you haven’t shown your writing to another trustworthy soul — be it through sharing it with a writers’ group, workshopping it, having it edited professionally, or asking a great reader whom you know will tell you the absolute truth — you haven’t gotten an adequate level of objective feedback. I know it seems as though I’m harping on this point, but I regularly meet aspiring writers who have sent out what they thought was beautifully-polished work to an agent without having run it by anyone else — only to be devastated to realize that the manuscript contained some very basic mistake that objective eyes would have caught easily.

Trust me, wailing, “But my husband/wife/second cousin just loved it!” will not help you at that juncture.

And emotionally, what are you doing when you send out virgin material to a stranger who, after all, has the institutional ability to change your life by bringing your book to publication? It’s the equivalent of bypassing everyone you know in getting an opinion on your fancy new hairdo and going straight to the head of a modeling agency. Professionals have no reason to pull their punches; if a publishing professional does take the time to critique your work, the criticism comes absolutely unvarnished. Even when rejection is tactful, naturally, with the stakes so high for the author, any negative criticism feels like being whacked on the head with a great big rock.

I’m trying to save you some headaches here.

But even as I write this, I know there are some ultra-shy or ultra-independent Emily Dickinson types out there who prefer to write in absolute solitude — then cast their work upon the world, to make its way as best it can on its own merits. No matter what I say, I know you hardy souls would rather be drawn and quartered than to join a writers’ group, wouldn’t you? You are going to persist in deciding that you, and only you, are the best judge of when your work is finished.

And maybe you are right.

I am not saying that a writer can’t be a good judge of her own work — she can, if she has a good eye, and sufficient time to gain perspective on it. I would be the last person to trot out that tired old axiom about killing your darlings; hands up, everyone who has attended a writers’ workshop and seen a promising piece that needed work darling-chopped into a piece of consistent mediocrity. CONSIDERING killing your pet phrases is often good advice, but for a writer with talent, the writer’s pet phrases are often genuinely the best part of the work.

However, until you get an objective opinion, you cannot know for sure how good your own eye is — and isn’t it just a trifle masochistic to use your big shot at catching an agent’s attention as your litmus test for whether you are right about your own editing skills? Even if you find only one person whom you can trust to tell you the absolute truth, your writing will benefit from your bravery if you ask for honestly locally first.

Ideally, you would run your submission materials past your writing group, or a freelance editor familiar with your genre, or a published writer IN YOUR GENRE. (No matter how good a poet is, her advice on your nonfiction tome on house-building is unlikely to be very market-savvy, unless she happens to read a lot of house-building books.) However, not all of us have those kinds of connections or resources. Professional editing, after all, isn’t particularly cheap, nor are the writing conferences where you are likely to meet writers in your field. (And even then, it’s considered pretty darned rude for an aspiring writer to walk up to a total stranger, however famous, and hand him a manuscript for critique. As in any relationship, there are social niceties to be observed first.)

In a pinch, you can always pick the most voracious reader you know or the person so proud of her English skills that she regularly corrects people in conversation. My litmus test is whether the potential reader knows the difference between “farther” and “further” — yes, they actually mean different things, technically — and uses “momentarily” in its proper form, which is almost never heard in spoken English anymore. (Poor momentarily has been so abused that some benighted dictionary editors now define it both as “for a moment” — its time-honored meaning — AND “in a moment,” as we so often hear on airplanes: “We will be airborne momentarily…” Trust me, you wouldn’t want to be in a plane that was only momentarily airborne… unless you have a serious death wish.)

In tomorrow’s post, I shall talk about strategies for getting the kind of good, solid feedback you need without treating your first readers like mere service-providers. (If you want to do this without engendering social obligations, you really should be working with a paid professional freelancer, rather than your friends.) Until then, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 1 Comment on Eye on the prize: living with feedback

Eye on the prize: living with feedback

I missed posting yesterday, because I was so busy getting my computer up and running again. Lots of programs to be reinstalled, iTunes to download (again! They change the program fundamentally every 20 minutes or so, apparently), and of course, backed-up documents to re-install. Because I am positively religious about making back-ups, I lost only about 4 days’ worth of work; phew!

And because I haven’t nagged you about it in a week or so: when’s the last time YOU backed up your writing projects?

I have also been letting some editorial feedback sink in: an editor at a publishing house has asked for a second round of revisions, some of which, at least at first glance, appear to contradict the last set of revision requests. Naturally, I’ll make the revisions, but I’ve learned from long experience to let them float around in my consciousness for a while before I head back to the manuscript. Much better to get the inevitable period of post-feedback grumpiness out of one’s system before rolling up the sleeves, I find.

Why is this a good idea? Well, a writer’s first response to critique tends to be emotional, rather than practical. Understandable, certainly, the need to trouble the air with bootless cries of, “Why does no one understand me?” for a day or two, but while in that neighbor-disturbing state, it’s hard to see the manuscript in question as a product to be marketed, rather than one’s baby who has just been attacked on the playground by a great, big, blue-pencil-wielding bully. And one does definitely need to think clearly and strategically in order to turn a manuscript around quickly.

Say, by Epiphany.

Naturally, that’s a bit of an exaggeration: I could probably get away with taking 3 weeks to rearrange the book completely, rather than 2.

Shocked? Don’t be: I really haven’t been kidding all this time about the wait-wait-wait-wait-read-I NEED IT NOW-wait-wait-REVISE THIS AND OVERNIGHT IT! rhythm of the publishing industry. Writers often panic at the wrong points — thinking, for instance, that they have to get requested materials out the door within a week of receiving the request, because that agent or editor is holding his breath, waiting for it.

Just so you know, there is no case on record of an agent being carted off to a hospital due to having turned blue in such a case.

The British comedy team of French & Saunders does a wonderful sketch, a scene between an author and her editor. They’re negotiating when the author needs to produce particular parts of the manuscript (“I could give you the first letter by the end of the year.” “Only a letter?” “Well, it would be a capital letter…”), and the editor is becoming increasingly agitated. At the end of the scene, she confesses that the book in question is their only book on contract, and the staff at her publishing house have absolutely nothing to do until the author turns in the manuscript.

You may laugh, but actually, this isn’t all that far from how many submitting authors think about agencies — or how many agented writers think of publishing houses, for that matter. It’s hard for even very experienced writers not to expect a more or less instantaneous response to their submissions, as if the agent or editor did not have any other projects. But realistically, they do.

This is not to say that it isn’t important that you meet your deadlines, of course, and naturally, you will want to get your requested materials in before you fade completely from living memory. But over the course of my writing and freelance editing careers, I have spoken with thousands of writers in I-must-get-this-out-the-door-now frenzies, and in the vast majority of cases, it’s the writer who has set the stress-inducing deadline — not the agent, not the editor. You may think that you have to revise your entire book in two weeks, because you received a letter asking to see the rest of your manuscript, but the fact is, if you send it in three or six, that’s within the same ballpark, as far as the industry is concerned.

And that’s why, in case you’re wondering, folks in the industry consider a 3+ month response time on a submitted manuscript acceptable. Particularly on novels. Their rationale is that, no matter how talented a writer is, or how marketable a story may be, the average reader is not on tenterhooks, refusing to buy any other novels until that writer’s comes out.

Go ahead, be appalled by this attitude. But you must admit, it does explain a lot about how agents and editors treat aspiring writers.

Although we writers seldom admit it in public, deep down, most of us do like to believe that there are people out there, bless them, who will rush out to buy our books simply because WE have written them, not because they contain information that the reader wants or a style the reader finds appealing. “My God!” our ideal readers cry. “I hadn’t known it, but I have been searching for this authorial voice all of my life!”

One of the cruelest awakenings most good writers have when they first start sending their work out to agents is the cold realization that in fact, the agency is not being overrun by editors clamoring specifically for their books’ particular prose stylings or wryly unusual worldviews. Nor are there necessarily already-established market niches for every well-written book.

How a writer deals with this first significant disappointment — whether she takes it as a challenge to refine her work, her pitch, and her bag of writer’s tools instantly, curls up in a ball and never sends anything out again, or chooses a path somewhere in between — is, although hidden from the world, one of the best indicators of future writing success. Because the ones who are willing to acknowledge that writing isn’t just self-expression, but also a business, stand a better chance of ultimately being able to tailor their work to an agent or editor’s liking.

I don’t mean to say that you will be best served by pretending that rejection does not hurt — it does. But hurt can lead to reevaluation, and reevaluation can lead to the breaking of bad habits. Not to mention toughening you up for the sterling moment when your agent tells you that five of the first ten editors who read your book ALMOST bought it, and the rest hated it.

The farther along you get in your writing career, the bigger the slap-in-your-face realizations become. (Imagine being the first runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize!) The earlier in your journey that you learn to accept rejection as a learning experience, the better off you will be later on.

Or, to put it in terms of me, me, me, if I hadn’t spent years developing revision, editing, and speed-writing skills, I would just have to throw up my hands right now in despair at meeting me very un-imaginary deadline. I hadn’t trained my kith and kin to respect the value of my work to me enough to expect that I would disappear into a revision frenzy at times like this, even with Christmas so few days away, everyone concerned would be far unhappier at the moment. And if I hadn’t schooled myself in recovering from the shock of critique rapidly, so I could get to work rationally and well, my book would be toast right now.

I did not acquire these skills overnight. In fact, if I’m honest, I have to report that I am still abjectly furious about the first high-handed editorial change anyone ever made to my work.

I was ten years old, and as crossing guard of the year, I had been selected to write and give a thank-you speech at the annual luncheon honoring parent volunteers at my elementary school. (Actually, they’ve never asked the crossing guard of the year to give the speech before or since, so my appointment to this coveted post may well have had more to do with my already fairly well-established writing abilities than with my whistle-blowing acumen.) I wrote the speech, a rather florid little number jam-packed with superlatives, and submitted it to my teacher and the principal for approval.

On the day before I was to give it, the manuscript was returned to me, unwisely marked with red pen at the end. If I close my eyes, I can still picture it: my teacher and principal had conspired to change, “We send you much love and many kisses” to “We send you mucho love and kisses.”

Instantly, I set up the time-honored writer’s howl of protest. “It’s stupid!” I cried. “And it isn’t grammatically correct in either English or Spanish!”
For the record, the average fifth-grade teacher does not like to be told that her students have a better grasp of grammar than she does. Even when it’s true. Perhaps even especially when it’s true. “It’s cuter that way, dear,” she assured me. “Everyone will love it.”

This was my first experience with editorial obtuseness toward authorial feelings, so I actually said what all of us think when we’re edited badly: “I don’t care if they love it. I’m afraid that they’re going to think that I wrote it wrong!”

I was loudly and harshly overruled, and the bad edit stayed. My teacher watched me like a lynx in the hours leading up to the speech, muttering threats under her breath as she led me up to the microphone, lest I revert to the pre-edited, grammatically-correct version.

Much to my astonishment, the adults in the room did burst into loud guffaws when I said the dreaded line in her version. It brought down the house. My teacher, mirabile dictu, had been right about what my target market wanted: a little girl in braids, spouting grammatical incorrectness. Who knew?

If you’re reading this, Mrs. Strong, I still think you were wrong. I was more than cute enough to have pulled off correct grammar.

I did, however, learn two valuable lessons that have served me well throughout my subsequent writing career. First, when people who are bigger and more powerful than you are decide to be wrong, they can generally get away with it. From schoolhouse to publishing house, I have found this to be consistently true.

Second, most of the time, when you make a small mistake, readers do not generally howl down the house or toss the publication straight into the fireplace. As my long-ago ballet teacher was fond of saying, the audience doesn’t know the steps; it’s your style that they notice, not your technical perfection.

The latter may seem like an odd observation to those of you who have spent months reading my repeated exhortations to make your submissions to editors and agents letter-perfect, but it is nonetheless true. The readers who are out there waiting to buy your books are not going to hold a few stray editor-induced lapses against you; everybody knows that the writer doesn’t do the final proofreading on a piece.

While it’s always annoying and hurtful to have your words changed before your eyes, chances are, the changes you are being asked to make will not brand the whole work as illiterate, or destroy your hard-won style. Relax a little, and realize that your agent and/or editor are, in schoolyard terms, far bigger than you are.

How I responded to that first editorial jab — with an initial fight, a begrudging acceptance of the inevitable, a workmanlike willingness to make the best of bad advice, and apparently, decades of residual resentment — has been, I must confess, absolutely indicative of how I respond today. I have been able to professionalize my behavior, but in my heart, I am still that irritated ten-year-old whenever I see the swipe of an editorial pen.

Ask me in thirty years what I was asked to change in my novel today; I’ll probably be able to tell you. But I will make the changes.

Mucho love and kisses, everyone, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on To pen name or not to pen name, part II

To pen name or not to pen name, part II

Yesterday, in response to a reader’s question, I went into the contentious issue of whether an author who writes in a number of different genres or book categories should use a unique nom de plume for each. As I pointed out yesterday, there are many in the industry who would say that unless your work sells awfully well, it simply doesn’t matter: unless the two books are likely to end up on the same bestseller table, who besides the alphabetizers at Amazon and a few scattered librarians is likely to notice?

Those who favor a different name for each book category would disagree: seeing the same name on disparate book spines can only lead to confusion, they aver. Not only does it make it harder for readers in a particular genre to track down the book they want online (for much the same reason that fans of an author named John Smith might have difficulties: a whole lot of hits would come up in a web search), but it also renders it less likely that an employee in a bookstore is going to be able to lead a curious potential customer to your book. 80% of the books sold in North America are still sold in bookstores, so word of mouth among bookstore employees is almost as important as it ever was.

Do you really, such arguers will ask an aspiring writer archly, want to make it harder for them to push your book?

It’s not quite this simple, however, and it’s probably no accident that defenders of the one-name-one-genre rule tend to be older people, ones who have been in the biz for 20 or 30 years. Quite a bit has changed in the interim: which books got face-out space on shelves, for instance, and positions on those tables near the cash registers, used to left up to the discretion of bookstore managers, but now, in the big chain stores, publishers rent that space in order to push their books. (I know; disillusioning, isn’t it?) And most buyers familiar with online shopping are too used to getting 3,000 hits on a single query to hold it against a particular author.

Also, computers have made it much, much easier for booksellers to track an individual author’s sales than in the bad old days – which makes it harder for distributors to push a second or third book to the big chains, if the author’s first book did not sell well. Or his most recent.

Which leads me to the most current reason semi-established writers adopt different names for themselves for new books, even if a subsequent book is in the same book category as earlier ones: to start fresh within the booksellers’ databases. It’s an industry-accepted means to clear the substantial stigma of a flop.

So the next time you pick up a book and think, “Gee, this new writer, George Washington, reminds me of Betsy Ross, that writer I liked five years ago. I wonder what ever happened to ol’Betsy,” maybe you shouldn’t wonder whether George was a writing student of hers in some obscure MFA program. Maybe you should wonder if Betsy had a name makeover instead.

All that being said, there are more one-name-one-genre advocates in the industry than those who advocate a more laissez-faire approach; unless a name is already fairly well established, many agents will advise writers to have different names for their fiction and nonfiction works, at least.

This does not apply to academic works, interestingly enough, from the industry’s point of view; frankly, practically no one in mainstream publishing follows academic publishing closely enough to notice if an author is getting published in both. Since there are an awful lot of professors who write fiction on the side, the more literary the book categories concerned (i.e., the better-educated the anticipated readership), the more acceptable keeping the same name is considered by agents and editors.

So it is indeed worth considering picking one name for each type of book you write. No one in the industry will fault you for doing it, certainly, and in a business that runs very heavily on name recognition, it’s not a bad idea to brand your mysteries differently from your literary fiction.

Which brings up an interesting question: given your druthers, which book cover would you rather have your real name gracing?

How do you pick otherwise? The standard wisdom dictates that if you already have articles on a subject published under a given name, every subsequent publication on that subject should be under that name. It establishes you as an expert – and that’s important for NF, for you will want to include these old clippings in your book proposals. If you have the luxury of publications under one name across a wide array of topics when you are moving on to books, figure out which articles had the widest readership, and keep the original writing name with those topics.

However, if your fiction and nonfiction is on similar subject matter, have a serious talk with your agent about whether you are more likely to retain your former readership under one name or two. Readers think a whole lot less about book categories than folks in the industry do: as much as publishing types like to tell one another that only a particular type of person buys a particular category of book, the fact is, the most cursory glance at how book buyers move around a bookstore will demonstrate that few readers look at only one or two shelves. If you are a good writer, your readers may well want to follow your work around the bookstore.

Recycle those past readers, I say.

So what does all this mean for strategizing your writing career? Well, obviously, if you are planning to write a book on a topic, it will be easier to sell to agents and editors if you have already published articles on the topic, under any name; equally obviously, if you are unfortunate enough to have released a book that did not sell well, you might not want to carry that contretemps into your next book’s marketing.

But regardless, naming decisions are generally made toward the end of the publication process, rather than the beginning: at the getting-an-agent stage, it matters far more that you HAVE past publications than which nom de plume you chose to slap upon them. Because even if you do decide to publish under several different names, it’s not as though you are going to keep your real identity a secret from your agent or editor, right?

You’re not Superman, after all. Although, come to think of it, have I ever seen you and Superman together?

Because, ostensibly, you would like your advance and royalty checks to be made out to the name your bank manager likes to call you, your real name AND any pen name you elect to use will be on the title page of any manuscript you submit to an agency or publishing house. (If you’re not sure how to pull this off gracefully, check out the Your Title Page category at right. There’s a standard formatting trick for this situation.) Trust me, if your agent thinks you should be marketing your next book under a new name, you’ll be the first person she’ll tell.

My advice: if you write across a number of genres or book categories, and are getting material published – hallelujah! – start establishing a different name for each type of unrelated work you write. That way, by the time you start publishing books in each of those genres or categories, your readers will already know your name(s).

After all, in the long run, isn’t your loyal fans being able to find your books far more important than what the industry wants you to do?

Keep up the good work!

P.S. Hey, if you live in the greater Seattle area, are even vaguely interested in children’s or YA fiction, and are not completely iced in this coming Saturday, December 2nd, why not check out the Secret Garden Bookshop’s 30th Annual Holiday Author Celebration? It runs from 10 am to 6 pm at 2214 NW Market Street (in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, so if you get a craving for lutefisk while you’re there, you’ll only have to step around the corner to get it), and they have an impressive array of well-respected writers all lined up to read their work – and chat with those who would like to emulate their successes.

Quite apart from the facts that this event is extraordinarily likely to be a lot of fun for kids and adults alike AND is a good opportunity for those of you with aspirations to write for the under-voting-age crowd to make excellent connections, the Secret Garden has a long track record of being simply marvelous about supporting local writers. It’s a genuinely marvelous independent bookstore, and that alone is worth celebrating! I’ll be there after 4:30 or so; if you can swing by to say hello, please do!

Posted on - 2 Comments on A writer by any other name…

A writer by any other name…

Oh, the luxury of having polished off a long series of posts! I get to write about whatever I want again. And what I want to do is revisit some of the many excellent questions readers have been posting as comments in recent weeks. My psychic detectors (and feedback from some readers) tell me that not everyone follows the comment strings — which, in many cases, would involve revisiting an already-read post — so I want to make sure that these important issues get addressed in the larger forum, too.

For instance, weeks back, inveterate wonderful question-formulator MooCrazy asked:

“Can a writer publish in different genres or on several different topics without diluting her ‘product’ and confusing the ‘customer?’ I think having been a free-lance magazine writer has resulted in my thinking that I can hop from one fascinating topic to the next. Please do a blog or series sometime about strategizing a writing career. Thanks!”

Moo, this is a great question, one that I know will speak to many, many writers. Most of us suffer from what Flaubert called, “the lust of the pen,” don’t we, an excited desire to write on a wide array of topics? Yet opinions differ widely within the industry about whether all of these literary effusions should be released under your primary handle: it really does depend upon both how well-known your writing is AND how common your name is. So lots of meaty discussion material here.

As with so much else that goes on in publishing, the prevailing wisdom varies on this point. Ask any given agent or editor whether a writer should (or could) use the same nom de plume across genres, and you will either be told that it just doesn’t matter OR that it would be absolute folly to use the same name on a horror novel and a mystery.

According to this latter school of thought, revealing that you have, like most mortal souls currently wandering the planet, a broad array of interests is a luxury reserved for only the best-known of writers: Anne Rice, for instance, or Stephen King. For lesser luminaries, this ilk advises, stick to one name per genre.

Well, that clears it up nicely, doesn’t it? Next!

No, but seriously, it’s worth looking into why each school of thought has its adherents before you make a decision on the subject. Publishing is a business, after all: presumably, if how we bill ourselves is of interest to the people who sell our books, it can only fascinate them for reasons related, however obliquely, to marketing. If using the names on our birth certificates for everything we write is going to be problematic, obviously, we should know about it.

About 75% of the authors I know who use pen names do so for non-marketing reasons, however. They may want to use their maiden names, perhaps, having spent their high school years fantasizing about how “Edna Curmudgeon” would look on a dust jacket. They may want not to use their current names, because they are writing a roman à clef, or because they have a nasty habit of incorporating their coworkers’ secrets into their novels, or because they really do not want their junior high school-age children to know that Mommy writes erotica. Sometimes, they just hate their birth names, or want to honor a passed-away grandmother. The reasons vary.

Or – and this is more common than one might suspect, given how hard it is for a writer to gain recognition in the first place – they want to retain their privacy. Now, there may be some very solid reasons for this; do you want, for instance, the signature you scrawl at book signings to be identical to the one that graces your checks? (I know a LOT of authors who develop a book signing-specific signature for this reason.) Do you want your readers to be able to look you up on the internet? In the local telephone directory? To be able to show up on your doorstep to argue with you about an ending they disliked?

Hands up, everyone who saw or read MISERY. (Speaking of writers with a history of writing under a number of different names.)

I have to say, having grown up around writers famous enough to have fans actually showing up on their doorsteps from time to time, I did have to think seriously about whether I wanted to publish under my real name. Both Philip K. Dick and Henry Miller, for instance, were well-established enough by the time I appeared on this terrestrial scene to attract the occasional stalker; I could tell you stories about science fiction conference incidents that would turn your hair gray overnight.

And, truth be told, I do have nonfiction published under several different names, so it would not be confused with my academic work. Most of the time, the objections to an academic’s publishing fiction under her real name comes from the academy side, not the publishing side, driven by the fear of being denied tenure, rather than confusing potential readers. Rumor has it, for instance, that there’s a quite prominent sociologist at a local university that shall remain nameless who writes steamy novels about her coworkers under an absurdly obvious pseudonym. But I digress.

However, once I decided to write a memoir, I made the decision: if I’m going to be honest about everything else in my life, why not own up to my real name? (Yes, believe it or not, Anne Mini is in fact the name on my birth certificate. My parents thought about my publishing career, too: according to family legend, they asked the maternity nurse to type out the name possibilities for me before they committed, so they could see what each would look like in print – and thus on a dust jacket.)

I’ve met a LOT of aspiring writers who fear the invasion of their privacy, but let’s be realistic about this for a moment: how many of your favorite authors would you recognize if you walked by them on the street? Most jacket photos are seriously outdated – sometimes for reasons of vanity, sometimes for reasons of economy, sometimes to make the author more fan-repellent – and let’s face it, few fiction writers are famous enough to be interviewed much on television. The chances of your being spotted just because you travel under your pen name are minimal. And if your name is a common one, changing it will not protect you.

Many writers change their names to make them either less common, less ethnic, or more memorable — the writer’s choice, mind you, rarely the agent or publisher’s. I happen to have been born with a very memorable name (a good indicator: how easy it was for kids to make fun of it in elementary school; I’ll spare you what they came up with for me), but if your name is, say, John Smith, you might want to punch it up a trifle. Ditto if you happen to have been christened Ernest Hemingway or Alice Walker – you really do want a name that readers will identify solely with you.

The ethnicity question is less straightforward. On general principle, I tend to frown upon writers (or actors, or directors, or politicians) Anglicizing their names, because collectively, it conveys the false impression that authors with non-northern European monikers are less worth reading. If you doubt the cumulative effect, think about the movie stars of yesteryear: to judge by their stage names, almost all of them hopped directly from the British Isles to Hollywood. And practically none of them, according to the names spelled out in lights, were Jewish, a fact that must have come as something of a surprise to their mothers.

The practice of automatic Anglicization is less common than it used to be, of course, but people still do it, alas. The usual argument is that more mainstream names are less likely to be mispronounced, and speaking as someone with Greek middle names, I guess I can understand that. Although my second middle name, Apostolides, is on every diploma I have ever received, and I always provided a phonetic transcription of it, every graduation of my life has been exactly the same: the degree-conferrer looks down at my diploma, pales visibly, looks up at me helplessly – and then announces me as only Anne Mini. Polysyllabic names are not for the faint of heart. And naturally, there is a good argument to be made in favor of your potential readers being able to walk into a bookstore and ask for your work by name, rather than stammering, “Do you have a book by Anne Apos…um…Apos…you know, that Greek lady?”

Does all of this seem incidental to the issue of whether or not it makes sense to use different pen names for different types of book? Actually, it isn’t: for those who say it doesn’t matter, the concerns above are the primary reasons for a writer to use an alternate name. Unless you sell a significant number of books in one genre, they argue, it’s not likely to confuse anyone who has ever done a computer search before to find you listed as an author in another genre.

If it excites comment at all amongst booksellers, they say, it will be of the “Margaret Atwood writes mysteries, too? No kidding?” variety, not the “Oh, my God, there’s a Margaret Atwood listed under fiction, and one under cookbooks! Am I going INSANE?!?” type.

Tomorrow, I’ll deal a bit more with the other, and rather more common, view on the subject. In the meantime, write widely, dear readers – and keep up the good work!

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Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XV: wrapping it all up and tying it with a nifty bow

Some exciting news today, campers: remember how I spent the month of October locked in my studio, making revisions on my novel, as requested by an editor at a major publishing house? No? Well, remember that long period when I was extremely grumpy? It has evidently borne some fruit: I have been asked to make a second set of revisions. Which, believe it or not, is good news; it means the editor liked my first set of revisions. Hooray!

Was that gasp I just heard the sound of a quarter of my readers clutching their hearts, crying, “Wait – a publisher can make an author revise a book TWICE before making an offer?”

Well, to tell you the truth, the second go-round is a touch unusual, but it’s not at all uncommon anymore for an editor to ask for some fairly hefty one-time revisions before there is even any talk of filthy lucre changing hands. And yes, in the past, it was traditional for a publishing house to buy the book first, before the fine-tuning began. So the next time anyone tries to tell you that the publishing industry is anything like it was even ten years ago, you know what to reply: the fiction market, and indeed the book market in general, is a lot tighter than it used to be.

All of which seems like a perfect lead-in to my last post on the Idol rejection reasons (if you do not know what these are, please see my post for October 31), because, really, it’s important to recognize that agents (most of them, anyway) don’t hold submissions to such high standards in order to be mean — they want to take on books that they know they can sell within today’s extremely tight market. It’s not enough for an agent to love your work; the agent needs to be able to place it at a publishing house for you.

And while, in the past, agents tended to be open to working with their clients in order to work out the technical kinks prior to submission to publishing houses, now most of them expect writers to submit manuscripts so clean and camera-ready that the agency screener could confidently walk them directly from the agency’s mail room to the desk of even the pickiest editor. Thus these last few weeks of weeding out the most common submission problems.

Today, however, we get the reward: the description of the kind of book that makes agents weak in the knees.

Surprisingly, agents tend not to talk too much about what they love about books at conferences — they tend to stick to describing what is marketable, because that is, after all, their bread and butter. But as those of you who have been querying strong, marketable projects for a while already know, agents often reject submissions for perfectly marketable books, a fact that is very confusing to those who have been taught (sometimes by agents at conferences) to believe that every agent is looking for the same thing, or to those who believe that a single rejection from a single agent means that everyone in the industry will hate a book.

Especially for first fiction, it’s not enough for an agent to recognize that a writer has talent and a book has market potential: they like to fall in love. If you’re a good pitcher, you already know the reaction I’m talking about: the eyes becoming moist with desire, the mouth appearing to go dry with lust. When an agent wants a project, the symptoms strongly resemble infatuation, and as the Idol series has taught us, it’s often a case of love at first sight.

As with any other type of love, every agent has his own particular type that is likely to make his heart beat harder, his own individual quirks and kinks. Just as an agent will train his screeners to rule out submissions containing his pet peeves, he will usually set some standards for the kind of project he would like to see forwarded to his desk. So, in a way, our old pal the underpaid, latte-quaffing, late-for-her-lunch-date screener is her boss’ dating service.

Here’s the list of what the Idol panelists said would light their fires sufficiently to ask for a second date — in other words, what would lead them to want to read beyond page 1 of a submission:

1. A non-average character in a situation you wouldn’t expect.
2. An action scene that felt like it was happening in real time.
3. The author made the point, then moved on.
4. The scene was emotionally engaging.
5. The narrative voice is strong and easy to relate to.
6. The suspense seemed inherent to the story, not just how it was told.
7. “Good opening line.”
8. ”There was something going on beyond just the surface action.”

“Hey,” I hear some of you out there saying, “isn’t there something missing from this list? Shouldn’t ‘This is a marvelous writer,’ or ‘That’s the best metaphor I’ve ever seen for a love affair gone wrong,’ or “Wow, great hook” have made the list? Shouldn’t, in fact, more of these have been about the craft of writing, rather than about the premise?”

Excellent questions, both. Would you like the cynical answer, or the one designed to be encouraging to submitters?

Let me get the cynicism out of the way first: they are looking for a book that can sell quickly, not a writer whose talent they want to develop over a lifetime, and that means paying closer attention to an exciting plot than to writerly skill. In essence, they are looking to fall in love with a premise, rather than a book.

The less cynical, and probably more often true, reason is that this is not the JV team you are auditioning to join: this is the big league, where it is simply assumed that a writer is going to be talented AND technically proficient. Unless an agent specifically represents literary fiction — not just good writing, mind you, which can be produced in any book category, but that specific 3-4% of the fiction market which is devoted to novels where the beauty of the writing is the primary point of the book — the first question she is going to ask her screener is probably not going to be, “Is it well-written?” Presumably, if a submission weren’t fairly well-written and free of technical errors, it would not make it past the screener. As we have seen before, the question is much more likely to be, “What is this book about?”

Before you sniff at this, think about it for a minute: the last time you recommended a book to someone, did you just say, “Oh, this is a beautifully-written book,” or did you give some description of either the protagonist or the plot in your recommendation? Even the most literary of literary fiction is, after all, about SOMETHING.

Ideally, any good novel will be about an interesting character in an interesting situation. Why does the protagonist need to be interesting? So the reader will want to follow her throughout the story to come, feeling emotionally engaged in the outcome. Why does the situation need to be interesting? So the reader will not figure out the entire book’s plotline on page 1.

If you have both of these elements in your premise, and you present them in a way that avoids the 74 rejection reasons I’ve been discussing throughout this series, most of the rest of the criteria on this love-it list will follow naturally. If the reader cares about the protagonist, the stakes are high enough, and the pacing is tight, the scene is much more likely to be emotionally engaging than if any of these things are not true. If you eschew heavy-handed description and move straight to (and through) the action, conflict is more likely to seem as though it is happening in real time, no one can complain that you are belaboring a point, and the suspense will develop naturally.

So really, all of this critique has been leading directly to the characteristics of an infatuation-worthy book.

Of course, all of this IS about the quality of the writing, inherently: in order to pull this off successfully, the writer has to use a well-rehearsed bag of tricks awfully well. Selecting the right narrative voice for a story, too, is indicative of writerly acumen, as is a stunning opening line. All of these elements are only enhanced by a beautiful writing style, of course.

However, most agents will tell you that lovely writing is not enough in the current market: the other elements need to be there as well. As well as a certain je ne sais quoi that the pros call an individual voice.

All of which is to say: submission is not the time to be bringing anything but your A game; there really is no such thing as just good enough in the current market. (Unless you’re already established, of course, or a celebrity, or you happen to have written the story that the agent always wanted to write himself, or…) Playing in the big leagues requires more than merely telling a story well — that’s the absolute minimum for getting a serious read within the industry.

Which brings me to #8, ”There was something going on beyond just the surface action.” Submission mail bags positively burgeon with clear accounts of straightforward stories, as well as with manuscripts where every nuance of the plot is instantly accessible to the reader as soon as it is mentioned. Books that work on a number of different levels simultaneously, that give the reader occasion to think about the world to which the book is introducing her, are rare.

That the Idol agents would be looking actively for such a book might at first blush be surprising. How much subtlety could a screener possibly pick up in a 30-second read of the first page of a manuscript?

Well, let me ask you: the last time you fell in love, how much did you feel you learned in the first thirty seconds of realizing it?

Pat yourselves on the back for making it all the way through this extremely sobering series, everybody: this was good, hard, professional work, the kind that adds serious skills to your writer’s tool bag. Be pleased about that – and keep up the good work!

P.S.: Hey, those of you interested in alternate realities: long-time reader and FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) Brian Mercer will be talking about his book, MASTERING ASTRAL PROJECTION on the radio show, The Darkness on the Edge of Town. The radio show will air on Sunday at 10 PM Central Standard Time at 1470 AM (for those of you in the greater Minneapolis area) or streaming live via the show’s website.

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Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XI: More technicalities

My flight has been delayed for an hour (due to leprechauns? Wing demons? The flight crew’s suddenly having been spirited off to Oz? No explanation appears to be forthcoming), so I am taking advantage of the unexpected time to write to you. Now that all of my liquid possessions are safely trapped in the now-mandatory clear plastic bags (since airline security is now apparently being handled by the Glad corporation), my feet are clad in seasonally-inappropriate shoes (because heaven forfend one should hold up the security line to deal with anything with laces), and having successfully wrestled with the question of whether to check the 50-year-old phone I needed to bring along for my interview (don’t ask) or carry it on, I am happy to use my remaining time in limbo to revisit more of the Idol rejection reasons (see my post of October 31).

By the way, I’ve been doing the dialogue experiment I suggested to you yesterday here in the airport, and I was mistaken in telling you that 99.9% of overheard conversations would not work in print. Based on today’s sample, I radically overestimated how much would be useable.

Which brings me to #32 on the Idol list, real-life incidents are not always believable on paper. I’ve blogged about this fairly recently (see my post for September 6, for instance, and a series in the second week of October), so I’m not going to dwell too long upon why any writer who includes a true incident within a fictional story needs to make ABSOLUTELY certain that the importation is integrated seamlessly into the novel. Or do more than nudge you gently about making sure that the narrative in including such incidents is not biased to the point that it will tip the reader off that this IS a real-life event. I’m not even going to remind you that, generally speaking, for such importations to work, the author needs to do quite a bit of character development for the real characters — which most real-character importers neglect to do, because they, after all, know precisely who they mean.

No, today, I’m going to concentrate on the other side of including the real, the way in which the Idol panelists used it: the phenomenon of including references to current events, pop culture references, etc. in a novel. The advice that utilizing such elements dates your work is older than the typewriter: Louisa May Alcott was warned to be wary about having characters go off to the Civil War, in fact, on the theory that it would be hard for readers born after it to relate to her characters.

Many, many writers forget just how long it takes a book to move from its author’s hands to a shelf in a bookstore: longer than a Congressional term of office, typically, not counting the time it takes to find an agent. Typically, an agent will ask a just-signed author to make revisions upon the book before sending it out, a process that, depending upon the author’s other commitments — like work, sleep, giving birth to quintuplets, what have you — might take a year or more. Then the agent sends out the book to editors, either singly or in a mass submission, and again, months may pass before they say yea or nay. This part of the process can be lengthy.

Even after an editor falls in love with a book, pushes it through the requisite editorial meetings, and makes an offer, it is extraordinarily rare for a book to hit the shelves less than a year after the contract is signed. Often, it is longer.

Think how dated a pop culture reference might become in that time. Believe me, agents and editors are VERY aware of just how quickly zeitgeist elements can fade — so seeing them in a manuscript sends up a barrage of warning flares. (Yes, even references to September 11th.)

About five years ago, I was asked to edit a tarot-for-beginners book. I have to say, I was a trifle reluctant to do it, even before I read it, because frankly, there are a LOT of books out there on the tarot, so the author was shooting for an already glutted market niche. (If memory serves, tarot books were at the time on the Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published list of books NOT to write.) So this book was heading for agents and editors with one strike already against it.

The second strike was a superabundance of references to the TV shows of the year 2001. In an effort to be hip, its author had chosen to use characters on the then-popular HBO show SEX & THE CITY to illustrate certain points. “In five years,” I said, “this will make your book obsolete. Could you use less time-bound examples?”

The author’s response can only be characterized as pouting. “But the show’s so popular! Everyone knows who these characters are!”

She stuck to her guns so thoroughly that I eventually declined to edit the book; I referred her elsewhere, and eventually, about a year and a half later, she managed to land an agent, who did manage, within the course of another year, to sell the book to a small publisher. The book came out at almost exactly the time as SEX & THE CITY went off the air.

The book did not see a second printing.

My point is, be careful about incorporating current events, especially political ones. Yes, I know: you can’t walk into a bookstore without seeing scads and scads of NF books on current events. Take a gander at the author bios of these books: overwhelmingly, current events books are written by journalists and the professors whom they interview. It is extraordinarily difficult to find a publisher for such a book unless the writer has a significant platform. Being President of Pakistan, for instance, or reporting on Hurricane Katrina for CNN.

One last point about pop or political culture references: if you do include them, double-check to make sure that you’ve spelled all of the names correctly. This is a mistake I see constantly as a contest judge, and it’s usually enough to knock an entry out of finalist consideration, believe it or not. Seriously. I once saw a quite-good memoir dunned for referring to a rap band as Run-DMV.

Half of you didn’t laugh at that, right? That joke would have slayed ’em in 1995. See what I mean about how fast pop culture references get dated?

Okay, my plane has finally arrived, so I am going to sign off now. Happy trails, everyone, and keep up the good work!

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Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part V: the usual saws

Were you surprised that I took the weekend off? It’s part of a new plan of mine, called GETTING A LIFE, over and above my writing. Having just finished a major revision — and composing a list of what I had and had not revised at the editor’s suggestion — I felt the need to, well, not work my usual 7-day week this week. Call me wacky.

“Wait just a second,” I hear some of you cry. “A list of changes in the manuscript? Why? And why on earth would any sane person ask a writer to produce such a list immediately after completing a revision, when the writer is likely both to be exhausted and a trifle touchy about her choices?”

The list of revisions is not all that unusual a request, once an editor at a major house is involved with a book. Essentially, it’s a time-saving technique. (Remember last week, when I was telling you about how busy such people are? Well…) Since manuscript changes are often quite subtle, and the editor is not going to sit down and read the old version and the new side-by-side (sorry to be the one to break that to you), many agents like to have the author provide a list, to forestall the objection that not enough of the requested changes were made.

Also, in the unlikely (a-hem) event that the editor does not have time to read the whole thing again, with such a list in hand, it would technically be possible for an editor to flip through and see what changed very quickly. Essentially, the list is the equivalent of having the author produce the kind of 1- or 2-page report that editorial assistants routinely provide on a project being considered.

I’m giving you a heads-up about it now, because very frequently, such a request comes as the proverbial ball out of left field to the writer, who is then left scrambling. If you know it’s a possible future request, you can just keep a list while you are revising. Clever, no?

And no, Virginia: no one in the industry will ever ask you for such a list for revisions performed BEFORE they saw the manuscript in the first place. So unless you want to get in practice maintaining such a list (not a bad idea, actually), there’s really no reason to keep track of your changes in such a concrete way until after you sign with an agent. But thereafter, it can be very, very helpful to be able to say, “What do you mean, I didn’t take your advice? Here’s a list of what I changed at your behest!” and be able to back it up.

Okay, back to demystifying the Idol list. (If that sounds as though I have suddenly begun speaking in tongues, please see my post for October 31.) I know I’ve been harping on it at some length now, but my theory is that conference advice is not all that useful as long as it remains, well, general. I think it’s important to take the overarching principles and show how they might be applied to a specific manuscript.

That being said, today’s group is the most literal, and thus the easiest to remove from a manuscript. These are the rejection reasons that are based upon sheer repetition: any agent in the biz has not only seen these phenomena before at least 147 times — and thus will automatically assume that a submission that contains them on the first page is not fresh — but has, in all probability, seen any particular one at least once already on that same DAY of screening.

So best to avoid ’em, eh?

I know, I know: a great deal of the advice out there, including mine, is about standardizing your manuscript prior to submission. But standard format and avoiding certain common mistakes is, perhaps counterintuitively, a way to make the individuality of your writing shine more. To put it the way my grandmother would: fashion can make almost anyone look good, but if a woman is truly beautiful, wearing conventional clothing will only make it more obvious that it is the woman, and not the clothes, who caught the eye of the observer. (Need I add that my grandmother was VERY pretty, and that a great many of her metaphors were style-related?)

The rejection reasons listed below are something different: they are common shortcuts that writers use, and thus, not particularly good ways to make your writing stand out from the crowd. Using the numbering from the original list, they are:

9. The opening contained the phrases, “My name is…” and/or “My age is…”
10. The opening contained the phrase, “This can’t be happening.”
11. The opening contained the phrase or implication, “And then I woke up.”
12. The opening paragraph contained too much jargon.
13. The opening contained one or more clichéd phrases.
14. The opening contained one or more clichéd pieces of material. Specifically singled out: our old pal, a character’s long red or blonde hair, his flashing green eyes, his well-muscled frame.
21. The character spots him/herself in a mirror, in order to provide an excuse to describe her long red or blonde hair, his flashing green eyes, his well-muscled frame.

Why do I identify them as shortcuts, and not clichés? Well, obviously, the clichés are clichés, but the rest are the kind of logical shorthand most of us learned in our early creative writing classes. Introduce the character (which manifests as “My name is…” and/or “My age is…”). Show perspective (“This can’t be happening.”). Add a twist (“And then I woke up.”).

The result is that agents and their screeners see these particular tropes so often that they might as well be clichés. They definitely don’t scream from the page, “This is a writer who is doing fresh new things with the English language” or “This story is likely to have a twist you’ve never seen before,” at any rate, and when a screener is looking to thin the reading pile, those are not the messages you want to be sending.

Another early English-class lesson has shown up with remarkable frequency on this list. Guesses, anyone? (Hint: the applicable rejection reasons are #9, the opening contained the phrases, “My name is…” and/or “My age is…”, #14, a character’s long red or blonde hair, and #21, the character spots him/herself in a mirror.)

Congratulations, all of you graduates of Creative Writing 101: they all stem from the oft-repeated admonition to provide physical descriptions of the character right away. As in within the first nanosecond of their appearing in a scene.

Also, I suspect, a lot of us read short stories and books in our formative years that used the age, sex, and/or gender (yes, they’re different things: sex is biological, gender is learned) as THE twist. I, personally, have never gotten over my disappointment that Stanley Kubrick’s film of Anthony Burgess’ book A CLOCKWORK ORANGE glossed over the single most shocking line in the book, when we learn that the thief, rapist, and murderer who has been narrating the story is only 15 years old. (Hey, that was still shocking, back in the 1960s.)

Basically, all of these rejection reasons share the same underlying objection: there’s nothing wrong with providing some physical description of your characters right off the bat, of course, but by all means, be subtle about it. And need a full description come on page 1?

Yes, I know that movies and TV have accustomed us to knowing what a character looks like from the instant he’s introduced, but is there a particular reason that a READER’S first experience of a character need be visual?

We are left to wonder: why are characters so seldom introduced by smell? Or touch?

But no: day in, day out, screeners are routinely introduced to characters by front-loaded visual images, a good third of them bouncing off reflective vases, glasses of water, and over-large silver pendants. We’ve all seen it: the first-person narrator who catches sight of his own reflection in a nearby mirror in order to have a reason to describe himself. Or the close third-person narration that, limited to a POV Nazi-pleasing single-character perspective, requires that the character be reflected in passing sunglasses, a handy lake, a GAP window, etc., so that he may see himself and have a reason to note his own doubtless quite familiar physical attributes.

Just once, could a passerby gag on a hero’s cloud of cologne?

Setting aside for a moment just how common the reflective surface device is — in the just over two hours of the Idol session, it happened often enough to generate laughs from the audience, so multiply that by weeks, months, and years of reading submissions, and you’ll get a fair idea — think about this from the screener’s perspective. (Did your tongue automatically start to feel burned by that latte?) That screener is in a hurry to find out what the novel’s story is, right?

So ask yourself: is that harried reader likely to regard superadded physical description of the protagonist as a welcome addition, or as a way to slow the process of finding out what the story is about? And how is she likely to feel about that, 5 minutes into her ostensible lunch break?

I know; it’s disillusioning. But as I keep reminding you, no one in the industry regards the submitted version of a manuscript as the final version. Nor should you. If you’re absolutely married to an upfront physical description, you can always add it back in to a subsequent draft.

The last remaining reason — #12, the opening paragraph rife with jargon — is, too, a shortcut, usually a means to establish quickly that the character presented as a doctor, lawyer, police officer, soil engineer, President of the United States, etc., is in fact a doctor, lawyer, police officer, soil engineer, or President of the United States. However, how often do you think a screener — or any other reader, for that matter — gets a couple of lines into a novel, then throws it down in disgust, exclaiming, “There’s just not enough esoteric technical talk here! I just do not believe that this character actually is a doctor/lawyer/police officer/soil engineer/President of the United States!”

Doesn’t happen. The opposite, however, does: when there’s too much profession-specific word usage, it can be very off-putting for the reader. And for the screener. With predictable results.

Do I hear some disgruntled murmuring out there? Are some of you saying, “But people talk like that in real life!”

Yes, they do. There are also plenty of people who say, “Um…” at the end of every other sentence, and mobs of nice folks who interlard every conversation with, “like” and “y’know.” Heck, there are millions of people in the world who speak Estonian — yet you would not even consider submitting a manuscript to an English-speaking agent or editor where every third word was in that fine language, would you? Even if your story were actually set in Estonia?

Save it — if not entirely, then at least until after page 5. Or after you have successfully cleared the submission hurdle.

We’re just whipping through this list, aren’t we? Soon, all of our first pages will be so snazzy that none of us will get rejected until page 2. In that happy hope, keep up the good work!

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Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part II: why are those first readings so harsh, anyway?

Are you recovered yet from the trauma of yesterday’s post? It honestly is jarring to step into an agent’s shoes, even for a couple of hours: theirs is a significant responsibility, one that tends to incline even the nicest person to peevishness. I’m going to talk about this responsibility today, because if you are going to use yesterday’s list of general rejection reasons fruitfully to improve your chances of submission success, you are going to need to understand why an industry ostensibly devoted to bringing the best writing to the reading public runs on knee-jerk first reactions to the first paragraphs of submissions.

In the old days, when editors would routinely take on writers of promise and work with them on a line-by-line basis to make their first books better, agents often signed writers whose voices they liked but whose presentation was less than perfect, or whose plots needed polishing, and send out their work. Now that agents are expected to screen out all but the most polished books before the editorial submission stage, the agents don’t have the luxury of falling in love (the way they usually put it, incidentally) with books as often as they used to be able to do. At least, not the ones who want to stay in business.

Now, the first book is starting on a higher diving board — and instead of the agent’s signing a writer just after she has started to climb, the author is practically at the top before the agent commits to walking the plank with her. Yet, as we’ve discussed here before, most of the rhetoric of the industry still implies that all a writer needs to be is talented to succeed.

That’s just not true. A writer needs to be brave, too, and willing to revise her work again and again until it’s so good that it’s quality is self-evident, even on the first page. It’s a tall order.

Before you start getting angry with agents for this situation, take a moment to consider submission from the editor’s perspective, because they have had a lot to do with creating the agents’ reject-all-we-can mindset. Even with the agencies screening out 98% of submissions, the average editor at a major house will still receive 4-6 new manuscripts per day. To put these numbers in perspective, at most of the major houses, thi is as many projects as any given editor takes on in a YEAR.

So they, too, are looking to cull radically. For this reason, generally, even after they’ve listened to an agent’s pitch for a book and decided whether they are interested in the premise or not, they do not read the manuscript until after it has passed through at least one level of editorial assistant screenings.

What does this mean, in practical terms? Basically, before the editor will read it, your book will be handed to someone who has, just like an agency screener, been handed a list of criteria. This person has two jobs: to write a summary review of the book, for the editor’s perusal, and to weed out as many submissions as humanly possible.

The quickest way to do that, of course, is to stop reading as soon as a red flag pops up.

See why those first few pages are important?

So at this point, your book’s fate relies not so much upon YOUR writing as upon the editorial assistant’s. Scary, no? If that review is positive, AND if the book fits into the publishing house’s notions of what it wants to be offering a year from now, the editor will read it. Before he lugs it home on the subway, however, the editor usually glances through the first few pages in order to try to weed it out of consideration.

Again, see why an agent might want those first few pages to be perfect?

“Wait a minute,” I hear some of you out there saying. “Why home? Isn’t reading my submission the editor’s job?”

Well, yes, technically, but as editors are fond of telling anyone who will listen, their days are a lot fuller than they used to be. A whole lot of meetings, for instance. So for manuscripts they have not yet accepted, or writers not yet signed, their reading time tends to be limited to a few stray moments throughout the day — and whatever time they can snatch during evenings and weekends. And since he can take on only a few projects per year — and those he will need to fight for in editorial meetings — he, too, will be reading in the hope of finding an excuse to say no.

Think about this for a moment, to understand just how much an editor has to like those first few pages to take it home. A manuscript read at home will competing for the reader’s time and attention with any or all of the following: the reader’s spouse or partner, if any; the reader’s kids, if any; going to the gym; giving birth; AMERICAN IDOL; following current events; taking mambo lessons; trying to talk his best friend through a particularly horrible break-up; his own particularly horrible break-up; Jon Stewart on THE DAILY SHOW; grocery shopping; a teething infant; a date with someone who acts like a teething infant; personal hygiene, and voting in local, state, and national elections.

Just between ourselves, I don’t think any of us should be surprised that when our manuscripts have been sitting in editorial limbo for a month; we should be surprised that it gets read in under a year.

Which is, again a good reason to make decisions very quickly. In the long run, a snap decision saves time. However, it may take them a long while to find a moment in which to make that snap decision.

So when an agent is seeing your submission for the first time, she is not merely thinking about whether your book is well-written; she is thinking about whether it is nay-saying-proof, whether it is interesting enough to compete with the ideal editor’s children, etc. She will only take on a project if she is confident will survive all the way through an honestly brutal submission process.

And that, my friends, is what the over-used rejection letter phrase “I just didn’t fall in love with this book” actually means. It is an admission that the agent does not think a particular book will run the nay-saying gauntlet successfully. Whereas statements like Nos. 72-74 from yesterday’s list (“It just didn’t work for me,” “It didn’t do anything for me,” and “I like this, but I don’t know what to do with it.”) translate into an admission that the agent isn’t so enthusiastic about the project that she is willing to help you make it strong enough to survive.

It does require a significant commitment of time and energy from the agent, because she is often doing part of what the editor used to do: telling the author what needs to be done to the book to make it marketable. Most of the time, the editors do not give specific line feedback to writers, even after they acquire a book. Instead, they write brief, general editorial memos, usually about 4 pages to cover an entire book.

Not precisely the writer’s fantasy of a close working relationship with a sympathetic editor, is it?

As anyone who has ever heard an editor speak at a conference can tell you, editors are more than a little defensive about how the industry has changed. They DO still edit, they insist — but what they are talking about, usually, is that brief editorial memo, not wrestling over problematic paragraphs with the author until they sing. It really miffs them to be told that the former is not the common conception of what editing is, though, so I wouldn’t advise bringing it up.

If you will pardon my jumping around from conference class to conference class a little, I think the “How to Make Your Editor Happy” list Kristen Weber of the New American Library (NAL) gave at the recent Flathead conference only goes to underscore this point. Here are the six dos and don’ts she identified for being the author the editors like:

1. Don’t make excuses about missing a deadline; just say when it will be there. Really, the editor has enough to do not to be waiting with bated breath for your revision. (This is her justification, mind you, not mine.)

2. Send all of your questions in a single e-mail, rather than sending them in a flurry was they occur to you. Better yet, ask your agent to answer them first.

3. Don’t panic if you don’t hear back from an editor within a reasonable length of time. They have a lot to do.

4. Don’t try to talk with your editor about how your book is doing on Amazon. (According to her, those numbers don’t really matter — which is a trifle odd, since online sales make up about 20% of the market now.)

5. Don’t ask why your book is not getting the same promotion, advance, etc. as another similar book.

6. Read Publishers Weekly or Publishers Marketplace, so you understand how the industry works and how often the decision-makers change jobs.

She did mention a seventh point, but it was not on her list per se: go ahead and make all the changes the editor asks you to make, because they know the market better than you do.

That’s it.

I think this list is admirable as an indicator of how the industry has changed, because of what it does not contain: any injunction that the writer would, say, take criticism well, or be able to incorporate it promptly. Or that the writer be committed to promoting the book. Or even that the writer would be good about adhering to deadlines. All of these requests are, essentially, pleas that the writer would not take up any more of the editor’s time than is absolutely unavoidable.

Because, you see, the editor is really, really busy. Blame his ever-expanding job description.

With such expectations, it might occur to you: so who does the author ask when, say, it’s been four months since the editor got her manuscript? Her agent, that’s who.

Blame HER ever-expanding job description.

Tomorrow, I shall dive a bit more into the nitty-gritty of the rejection reasons from the Idol session. In the meantime, pat yourself on the back for being brave enough to want to submit your work under these conditions, and keep up the good work!

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Hanging with the cool kids

Yes, yes, I took a couple of days off, and I am interrupting my series on the rigors of lifting scenes from real life, but I assure you, it’s all in the name of a good cause: I ventured north with a couple of fabulous writer friends to the Surrey Writers’ Conference this last weekend. A big hello to the dozen or so of you I met there! I always love meeting my readers, especially when they are being brave and virtuous enough to get out there and pitch their work. (Even when you corner me to ask if I REALLY meant it about changing all of the emdashes in your manuscripts to doubled dashes. The agent with whom I was enjoying a drink at the time thought that was pretty funny. I gathered; I will now forever have the reputation of being the Pacific Northwest’s Resident Grammar Harpy.)

So I have been schmoozing internationally, partially for professional development, partially for fun, and partially in the hope of spreading last summer’s amazingly successful Pitch Practicing Palace to maple leaf flagged pastures in future. To be precise, my friends and I did what writers who have passed the Rubicon of representation are supposed to do at conferences: we hung out in the bar, chatting with agents, editors, and the other presenters.

Had I mentioned before that if you are serious about making connections, the best place to make connections at almost ANY writers’ conference is the bar? Ditto with the space outside where the smokers lurk. Why? Well, let’s be charitable and say the reason is that writers tend to work in scattered isolation, and leap at the chance to socialize with their own species.

The more important reason is that these are also the places where the agents and editors are relatively safe from hallway pitchers — and as someone who routinely yammers at you to take your courage in your hands and buttonhole agents to pitch to them, I should probably speak to that. As those of you who are long-time readers of this blog already know, if you are at a conference to find an agent, I think it’s a trifle silly to limit yourself to only your assigned pitch appointment. If your dream agent is walking by, I see no reason that you should not approach her for a polite pitch; I know many, many good writers who have found their agents this way.

An even more polite way to do it is to walk up after the agent has taught a seminar at a conference, heap the preceding class with praise, and ask if you may have a minute of his time to pitch. I know a wonderful writer who landed his agent by routinely presenting himself at one end of the dias at agents fora and pitching his way from right to left all the way down the stage. Most agents are sweet, writer-loving people, contrary to their reputations as book-rejecting machines: they will usually agree to give a minute of their lives to a writer courteous to ask them nicely for it.

The catch: you should use ONLY a minute of their time. Also, don’t follow the agent of your dreams into the bathroom to pitch; it’s considered gauche. (And believe me, it does happen. All the time.) Stalking is also considered beyond the pale, but I’m sure that all of MY readers are far too charming to, say, insist upon pitching a jet-lagged agent the moment he pops out of his hotel room in the morning or as he is staggering back into it, his head reeling with pitches, late at night. (Again, a story I’ve heard more than once in a conference bar.)

Remember, too, that agents are individuals, not walking representatives of an entire industry – if they say they aren’t interested, or they don’t represent your type of work (do a spot of research first, okay?), THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AS A WHOLE IS REJECTING YOU. If your hallway pitchee (or any pitchee, for that matter) says, “Gee, I don’t think that’s for me,” don’t argue. Just thank the agent for her time, melt away, and move on to your next pitch.

Which brings me back to the conference bar. Because there are — hooray, hooray — so many aspiring writers who are brave enough to make hallway pitches, and there are, alas, stalkers and other rude people, already-agented writers like me are rather restful company for agents and editors. (As the agent who bought us breakfast yesterday morning — not for nefarious reasons, mind you; one of my friends is her client — said when we tried to reach for the bill, “Hey, none of you want to pitch me. I love you.”) We’re neither giving them the hard sell nor hanging on their every word as a hint to future success.

We treat them like — gasp! — people.

And that, for those of you who have wondered about the bar phenomenon at conferences, is why the agents and editors are so often to be found there, talking with people like me. Which makes it an excellent place to schmooze, even — and this surprises a lot of conference neophytes — in the middle of the day. It’s sort of like the safe spot in a game of tag; they can stop running when they’re there.

Not that you should just pull up a chair — need I even say that this happens, too? — and plop yourself in the middle of a group of influential strangers. Make friends the way you would at any other party. Observe the social graces, for heaven’s sake; get someone like me to introduce you.

Yes, it’s true: writers like me are in fact the social lubricant of the conference bar. Cultivate us; buy us breakfast: most of us are nice people, too, who enjoy helping talented people make good connections. Remember, a smart agent-seeking writer does not go to conferences merely to pitch: she also goes to meet other writers — especially ones who routinely hang out in bars at conferences, schmoozing.

After all, an agented writer often has spent a significant portion of her life at literary conferences — we tend to know a LOT of other writers, editors, and yes, agents. And I’ve literally never heard an established writer say at a conference, “How the hell should I know what agent to recommend you query?” Being human beings, many of us just love being approached as beacons of wisdom. Seriously, it’s kind of fun, after years of struggling for recognition — and the newly-agented often have very extensive lists of who represents what still lingering in their brainpans. Go ahead, make a few friends by asking for advice.

This is not to say that everyone you meet in a conference bar will be bowled over at the opportunity to help you, or that you should treat every casual conversation as an opportunity to pitch your work. They won’t, and you shouldn’t — and not only because it’s not very polite to yammer endlessly about yourself to a brand-new acquaintance. While I would dearly love to be able to report that every single person you’re going to meet at a writers’ conference is a sterling human being eager to help your career, since we are talking about hanging around in a liquor-serving establishment here, I’m going to add a few prudent caveats to my recommendation that you try to make new friends in this environment.

If you’re new to the game, hit the bar with a friend or two, to be on the safe side, and if you’re underage, do your schmoozing at lunch, when most hotel bars also serve food. Also, if you missed my height-of-conference-season post on why it should NEVER be necessary to visit the hotel room of someone to whom you’re pitching, please see my series on conference lore (category at right) before you go traipsing off with anyone. No matter how long an author’s work has graced the NYT bestseller list, or how many millions of copies an agent’s clients have sold, your chances of making a good professional connection are far better if everyone’s clothes stay on.

I’m not just being a fuddy-duddy; I have nothing against a little light nymphomania from time to time, but we’re talking about your future career here. Writers’ conferences are hardly notorious for being hotbeds of sin (well, okay, Maui), but I don’t want to see any of you getting hurt. Your grandmother was right: petting won’t make you popular, and it definitely won’t help you get your book sold.

Remember, too, that just because you’re in a bar doesn’t mean you have to be drinking. If you’re drinking a tonic-and-lime (my personal favorite) or a soft drink, no one is going to sneer at you, as long as you tip your server appropriately. I’m very serious about this last part. You may well be there for hours, so think of it as table rent; your server has to eat, too, and for all you know, the agent or editor with whom you’re hobnobbing put herself through an MFA program by cocktail waitressing. Besides, buying a round or two at a conference is a legitimate business expense for a writer — if you’re going to be asking for a receipt, tip accordingly.

Most importantly, though, keep your head about you. It’s never a good idea to drink too much around people you are trying to impress — yes, even if they are drinking a great deal themselves. At the risk of sounding like one of those 1950s social guidance films for school kids: drinking a great deal will NOT make you more likable.

It will, however, make you hung-over at your pitch the following morning. Trust me, I used to teach frat boys at major football school; I know a LOT about the after-effects of alcohol on the human intellect. Know your limits, and stick to them.

And, if you want to be welcome at the conference bar the next time around, please observe the great rule of mixing business with pleasure: never, never, NEVER pitch in a social situation unless the agent or editor sitting next to you ASKS, “So, what do you write?” In the bar, these people are off-duty; please respect that, no matter how much you want to use it as a business occasion. Even if the circle of drinkers is talking about NOTHING but the industry, it will break the mood if you act as though you’ve walked into a pitch meeting.

Often, agents will ask, if they like you, and then it is perfectly appropriate to pitch, of course. It is also perfectly appropriate to walk up to the person with whom you were enjoying tonic-and-lime the night before and say, “Hi, X, I didn’t want to bug you last night when you were relaxing, but may I pitch to you now?” Polite people generally get brownie points. And, of course, you can always send a post-conference query beginning, “I so enjoyed chatting with you at the recent Surrey conference. I hope you will be interested in my book…”

But please, let these poor souls have a little down time. As someone who routinely listens to pitches for hours at a time, let me tell you, pitch fatigue can hit a well-meaning listener hard, especially one who has flown or driven a few hours to get to your fair city. (Or one who did not stick to tonic-and-lime the night before, for that matter.)

Being a good listener takes quite a bit of energy, after all. By the end of a conference day, agents are often tired, brain-befuzzed and, depending upon the stalker-to-polite-person ratio at that particular conference, feeling hunted. Believe me, you’ll make a better impression in the long run if you do not interrupt them in mid-hamburger to pitch.

Okay, I’ve spent enough time being the Good Manners Fairy for today; I need to get back to my revision now. Tomorrow, back to the real-life scenes — and, as always, keep up the good work!

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Assumptions, assumptions, part III: editorial suggestions

Those of you who read yesterday’s post may well be wondering: why did the shipping-box/manuscript analogy spring to mind right now, while in mid-revision on my novel? Well, it’s never a good idea to be TOO specific about deals before they go though, so let’s just posit a hypothetical situation and analyze that. (And fair warning: this post will make a LOT more sense, I suspect, if you have already read Assumptions, Assumptions, Part II.)

Let’s say an editor at a house-that-shall-remain-nameless-until-it-makes-an-offer has asked a novelist to change a book in certain very specific ways before they will proffer a deal. Let’s assume further that the vast majority of these, shall we say, strongly suggested changes are fine, perfectly sensible, and even praiseworthy. Paragons of feedback, they are. A couple, however, while not precisely things that the book’s protagonist would never do, are conceptually problematic.

So much so that I believe I can derive a general revision axiom from it: NEVER assume that an editor who is interested in your book will necessarily know much about its subject matter. Especially if it’s fiction. You honestly do need to explain yourself in a submission, EVEN IF YOUR TARGET MARKET IS A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO WILL ALREADY BE FAMILIAR WITH YOUR SUBJECT MATTER.

Why? Because even if you’re writing for experts, unless you are dealing with a publishing house that specializes in your particular field, your submission will probably not be landing on the desk of an editor with your target reader’s background. In fact — and I tremble to bring this up, but often it’s true — your book may actually be the editor’s introduction to your particular slice of your subject.

Counterintuitive, isn’t it? You’d expect an editor who specialized in gardening books to know his way around a potting shed, wouldn’t you? And it would make sense that if an editor was going through a spate of acquiring books about Paris, she would have a pretty good grasp of how the Metro works, whose picture is on French money, etc.

However, editors at the major publishing houses, like agents, can no longer afford to be quite the specialists that they once were. Take a look at the average editor’s last few years of acquisitions, and the breadth of subject matter may astonish you. Even within books on a particular subject, there may still be quite a range: Lonely Planet Savannah, Charleston & the Carolina Coast and MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL were both NF books set in Georgia, after all.

Among fiction editors, subject matter breadth is generally even more extreme: the same editor, Anika Streitfeld of MacAdam/Cage (at the time; now she’s at Random House — remember how I told you people move around a LOT in this industry?) acquired THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE and THE MADHOUSE MEMOIR OF MARY TODD LINCOLN. In the same year.

So just because an editor likes your novel, it does not necessarily follow that she will have a background in its underlying subject matter. They are generalists, even if they deal in only one genre — and this can be problematic at submission time.

Although most of us novelists harbor a secret belief that the writing is actually what our books are about, and folks in the industry make a fairly sharp distinction between character-driven and plot-driven novels, the vast majority of fiction is about SOMETHING other than the relationships between its characters. If your protagonist is a coal miner, for instance, coal mining is obviously going to play a fairly significant role in the book, right? (In fact, in a character-driven novel, background tends to be more important than in a plot-driven book.)

If the acquiring editor had no prior experience with this underlying something, or is prey to misconceptions about it, you and she may well have different ideas about how that something should be treated. Which would present a fairly considerable field of potential conflict between the editor and the author.

At our hypothetical author’s stage of the process — requested revisions with an eye to an eventual acquisition — there is no conflict per se, for the exceedingly simple reason that one of the things an editor buys with a publishing contract is the right to speak with the author directly. In the buying stages, everything goes through the agent.

So at this point, 100% of the author’s information about the changes that this editor — whom, lest we forget, the author has never met, and thus whose personal tastes she does not know, beyond the fact that the editor likes the author’s writing — wants come from an extremely flattering 2-page editorial memo and such snippets of the author’s agent’s discussions with her (also flattering) as have been passed on.

In other words, the agent opened the box, took a look at the contents, and successfully pitched it to the editor. The editor, in turn, rummaged through the contents and liked what she saw but, not knowing the sender, relied upon what her life experience told her about certain aspects of the book should play out. She did want the wineglasses, but she thought perhaps the stems should be shortened and the bowl made shallower: basically, she wanted to drink white wine out of glasses that were designed for red.

Which, naturally, is a prospect that would make a giver who, say, grew up near a winery blanch.

However, in this kind of offer — that is, where the author is expected to revise first and get paid later, as opposed to the kind offer that comes with competitive bidding, where changes are generally made AFTER the publishing contract is signed — the author really had only two options here, to make the requested changes or to take the book elsewhere.

Almost everyone, as you might well imagine, opts for making the changes. Even when some of those changes are primarily to cater to an incorrect notion of a phenomenon described in the book. And this might mean, for instance, having to come up with a new way to approach a protagonist’s medical condition, a spin that will conform more closely with the editor’s ideas about it. So in the interests of verisimilitude, the hapless author may well be reduced to bugging specialists thither and yon, trying to come up with a compromise pathology.

All part of the biz, my friends, in this kind of situation. The moral of the story, I think, is multifold. First, the box had better be packaged right, or it’s not going to get in the front door. Second, publishing types, agents and editors in particular, do not see the contents of the box as set in stone until it is actually set in print. In their eyes, a manuscript is always ripe for revision until they like what they see without reservations.

Which is not, to put it as gently as possible, how we writers tend to view our own work. But to succeed in the publishing world, it is very helpful to know that our views on the subject are not universally shared, any more than each of our backgrounds or knowledge set.

Cultivate flexibility, my friends, so you are ready to rise to such challenges! And, as always, keep up the good work!

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Assumptions, assumptions, part II: the importance of packaging

I begin today with a parable. And I’d advise getting comfortable for the telling, my friends: it’s gonna be a lengthy one.

A package appeared on my doorstep the other day. Now, the fact that someone had left me a present was not in itself that astonishing — after all, it was my birthday (many thanks to those of you who wrote in with felicitations!). What WAS strange was that this gift was wrapped in generic plain newspaper (the funnies, admittedly, but still, it was pouring that day) and was signed, in a handwriting I did not recognize, from “Your Secret Pal.”

I understand that the Department of Homeland Security frowns upon such lighthearted pranks. I’m quite sure that they’re looking for my college Secret Santa now (although, because it was Harvard, he was actually called — and I swear that I’m not making this up — Furtive Non-Denominational Gift Giver).

I was a trifle nonplused, of course, but that did not stop me from opening the box. Not everyone would have opened an unidentified box, though (see earlier comment about Homeland Security). Years ago, I mailed a set of tiki god party lights (I know, they sound tacky, but oh, they nearly brought a tear to the eye, I assure you) to my brother, via a shipping service that favored a generic shipping label whose return address gave no indication whatsoever who had actually, you know, instigated the mailing. So my brother, not the world’s most trusting soul on a good day, and moreover a doctor whose practice was located quite close to a clinic that catered to the reproductive freedoms of its clientele (if you catch my drift) immediately decided that it was a bomb and took it straight to the police department.

The nice police officer took it away and handed it to the bomb squad, which in such a small town probably consisted of an X-acto knife, a curious secretary, and a drug-sniffing dog named Rover. A few minutes later, he returned, the open package in his arms. “It appears to be a present, sir,” he told my brother, straight-faced. “I hope you’re fond of tiki gods.”

With this in mind, I tore my birthday box open. It contained a box of quite nice gargantuan wineglasses, honestly a bit big for anything but the meatiest Bordeaux or Cabernet Franc (hey, I grew up upstairs from a winery, so I know these things), but great for housing a mango mousse with rhubarb swirls. If one’s tastes ran in that direction.

For days, I obsessed about to whom to send a thank-you card. Not to boast, but I don’t suffer from a shortage of pals fond of a joke — or, for that matter, pals confident enough in their own uniqueness to believe that their handwriting would be instantly recognizable. (This seems to be a local phenomenon, as nearly as I can tell: for those of you who don’t live in the Pacific Northwest, it’s not all that unusual for telephone callers in these parts not to identify themselves at the beginning of calls they’ve initiated to friends. I’m constantly having to ask, after a gigantically friendly greeting, “And WHO is this, please?”) I compared notes, asked friends leading questions, racked my doorstep for clues: I was a regular Perry Mason.

Four days later, I received a call from my godmother. Better mannered than most, she identified herself, at least well enough that I knew who she was: “It’s moi, darlinki. Did you find my present?” She was flabbergasted that I hadn’t identified the giver instantly, because she had just assumed that she had, at some point in our 40-year acquaintance, happened to mention that one of the most cherished rituals of her childhood had been that an old jazz musician friend of the family would leave presents “from your secret pal” every birthday.

I will swear on a stack of anything you like that I had never heard that story before.

What does this have to do with the fine art of revision, you ask? Quite a lot, actually: the package is a metaphor for how editors view a new author’s manuscript submission to a publishing house. (And you thought I didn’t have a point!) Unless that box is packaged properly, in exactly the way the recipient expects tiki god party lights to arrive wrapped, the box might never make it past the doorstep.

In other words, it would behoove you to adhere to standard formatting.

Second, most editors — as a matter of policy at the big houses, in fact — are like my brother: they would vastly prefer that someone else open a mysterious package first, please, to tell them whether it is something they would like to have or something awful. And that, in a nutshell, is why publishing houses favor agented work. The agent opens the package, assesses its value, and wheedles the editor into taking a look at the pre-screened contents.

The package left by my godmother, on the other hand, is like the manuscript I mentioned yesterday, the one that assumes that the reader is going to cotton to a shared worldview, lexicon, knowledge base, etc. And, admittedly, had I known about the secretive jazz player, I probably would have caught on immediately to the joke and known who sent it. But, like most editors at most publishing houses, I didn’t know enough about either the package or its sender before I opened it to understand the logic of the giver.

With a birthday present, such misunderstandings are easily remedied, of course. With a book submission, they generally end in rejection. Yes, even if the writing is sterling and the plot thrilling: never forget that a publishing house, like an agency, is not a monolithic entity housed by robots with identical tastes, but rather by people with individual ones.

So package your work with care, my friends, and make your work as accessible as possible by providing any and all necessary background, preferably in an entertaining manner. Tomorrow, I’ll move on to what this might look like in practical terms. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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The agency contract, Part IV: Show me the money

Did you think I was going to sign off on my series on contract explanation without addressing the issue most on the average agent-seeking writer’s mind? Perish the thought.

Yes, Virginia, the agency contract will specify the percentage of your advances and royalties your agent will get. And no, abiding by this is not left up to the goodness of your heart: if you are represented by an agent, your publication contract will specify that the publisher will send your checks to your agent, not directly to you. This means that any money you see will automatically have the agents’ percentage deducted from it.

Typically, in literary agencies, this percentage for is 15% for English-language North American sales. Script agents generally get 10%. In either case, the contract may either be on a yearly (or longer) basis or a per-project basis: find out which, so you are aware of the terms of renewal. If you are planning to write more than one thing, do be sure before you sign that your agent will want to represent everything you want to write.

These percentages are non-negotiable in virtually every agency on earth, so the point of examining your contract is not to gain haggling ammunition: it’s to prepare you for the day when a check arrives with fewer zeroes on it than your advance led you to expect. And no, a lower percentage does not usually mean a better deal for the author – it’s usually an indication that the agency is new, and is trying to attract high-ticket clients.

Pretty much every agency in the country takes a significantly higher cut of foreign sales: 20% or more is the norm. (For reasons I have not been able to fathom, my agency takes 23% of sales in the Baltic republics, so they’ll really score if my memoir takes off in Lithuanian.)

The higher price tag abroad is for a very practical reason: unless an agency has an outpost in a foreign country (as some of the larger agencies do) it willsubcontract their foreign rights sales to agencies in other countries, who take their cut as well. So if you suspect that your book will have a high market appeal in Turkey or Outer Mongolia, you might want to check up front whether your prospective agency has a branch there, or is subcontracting. The differential in commission percentage can be substantial.

“Um, Anne?” I hear a small, confused chorus out there piping. “Was the bit about English-language North American sales just a really complicated typo? Aren’t there other people in the world who read English — like, say, the people in England? Why aren’t all of the English-language sales lumped together, and the foreign ones together?”

Ah, because that would make sense, my friends. The industry likes to keep all of us guessing by throwing a cognitive curve ball every now and again, so this is going to require a fairly extensive and rather convolutedexplanation. Before I launch into it, you might want to pop into the kitchen and make yourself some tea, or fluff up the pillows on your ottoman. I’ll wait.

Okay, everybody comfortable? Here goes: from the point of view of your garden-variety US publisher, books published in the English language fall into three categories: those sold in North America, those sold in Great Britain, and those sold in other countries. Of the three, only those in the first category are considered English-language sales, for contractual purposes. The last two are considered foreign-language sales.

There — and you thought it wasn’t going to make sense…

So, perversely, if EXACTLY the same English-language book by a US author was sold in Canada and Great Britain, the author’s US agent would take 15% of the royalties on the first and 20% on the second. (This situation is not at all beyond belief: HARRY POTTER is, I am told sold in a slightly different form in the former Commonwealth than in the U.S. Why? Well, chips mean one thing to a kid in London and another to a kid in LA, and while apparently the industry has faith that a kid in Saskatchewan could figure that out, it despairs of the cultural translation skills of a kid in Poughkeepsie.)

This is why, in case you were curious, you will see the notation NA in industry discussions of book sales – it refers to first North American rights, minus Mexico. Rights to sell books south of the border, in any language, fall under foreign language rights, which are typically sold on a by-country basis.

However, occasionally an American publisher will try to score a sweet deal on a book expected to be a bestseller and try to get the world rights as part of the initial deal, but this generally does not work out well for the author. Why? Well, if a book is reprinted in a second language and a North American publisher owns the foreign rights, the domestic house scrapes an automatic 20% off the top of any foreign-language royalties accrued by the author. (If this seems a trifle technical, chalk it up to the rather extended struggle I had to retain my memoir’s foreign rights; back in the day, my now-gun-shy publisher wanted ‘em, big time. But they’re mine, I tell you, all mine!)

Be very wary of an agent who is not willing to offer you a written contract. Contrary to popular belief, verbal contracts may be binding (if some consideration has changed hands as a result of it, as I understand it; if you handed someone a $50 bill and the keys to your car after the two of you had discussed his painting a mural on the passenger-side door, I’m told that could be construed as a contract, even with nothing in writing), but as I MAY have pointed out, oh, 1800 times in the last 6 months, this is an industry where the power differential tends not to fall in the writer’s favor until after she is pretty darned well established. Protect yourself.

Do not assume, however, that you will ever see another copy of the contract again after you sign it. Make yourself a photocopy – yes, even before the agent has countersigned it – so you may refer to it later.

I know that this series has occasionally read as if agents are evil trolls, waiting under every bridge into Manhattan in the hope of defrauding innocent authors, but I am only trying to get you to put up your antennae when dealing with them. The vast majority of agents honestly are good people who love good writing and want to help writers – but as in every profession, not all of them are scrupulous about fulfilling their obligations toward their clients. It behooves us to be cautious.

Please, when the time comes: don’t be so flattered by an agent’s attention that you just agree to everything you are asked. That’s how good writers get hurt, and I don’t want to see it happen to you.

On to cheerier topics tomorrow, thank goodness! Keep up the good work!

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The agency contract, Part III: double indemnity?

When last we spoke – electronically, that is – I was waxing poetic about the need to take a close gander at an agency contract before you sign it, to prevent unpleasant surprises down the line. (I know, I know: we should all have such problems. But by preparing you for them now, my hope is that you will be a happier camper in years to come. Or sooner, if you’re lucky.)

While you are looking over the contract, check to see whether you are signing with the agency as a whole or with the agent specifically: contracts come both ways. Agents move around all the time, and some agencies can have pretty short lifespans. If your agent retired, for instance, would you still be represented? What about if your agent started an agency of her own? Or, heaven forefend, died or decided to scrap her career and follow the Dalai Lama around for a decade or two?

My friend May, for example, found out too late that her contract was with her agent, not her agency: amazingly enough, no one filled her in on the possibility until after her agent had actually passed away.

Something of a surprise, as you may imagine; May hadn’t even known that she was sick. (After you’ve hung out around represented writers for awhile, you will start to notice how often authors are NOT informed about illness, imminent life or career changes, or sometimes even the firing of their agents and editors. We writers always seem to be the last to know.)

May was very sorry, of course, because she had liked her agent very much, but it never occurred to her that she no longer had representation. Until she received a letter from the agency, a couple of weeks later. Seems that the agency had hired a replacement agent – who did not represent May’s kind of work. So sorry; best of luck elsewhere.

No offer to help her find another agent, nothing. Just goodbye and good luck. Incredulous, May checked her contract and, sure enough, she hadn’t signed with the agency at all, only her late agent. She was back on the querying junket again.

Why the distinction? Well, it actually has more to do with the internal structure of the agency than your agent’s relationship with you — or any other writer, for that matter. Agencies vary quite a bit. Some are set up so the royalty money all goes into a common pool, funding the entire agency, and some are run like hairdressing establishments, where each chair, so to speak, houses an independent contractor, and no funds are mixed.

Why should your agent’s employment arrangements concern you? Well, if you are the client of an independent contractor-type agent, if she leaves the agency, you more or less automatically go with her. If your contract is with the agency, you probably will not. (May’s contract was the former.)

And if your agent has a track record of agency-hopping every couple of years – as many junior agents do; it’s a smart way to build a professional lifetime’s worth of contact lists – may I suggest that this is a contractual arrangement that may affect your life pretty profoundly?

My friend Katherine, one of the most talented writers I know, was thrown for an unexpected loop by such a move, and at least in the short run, her book’s marketing prospects suffered for it. Her contract left the issue a bit ambiguous, specifying that Katherine would be represented by Agent X AT Agency Y. So when Agent X, without any advance warning, suddenly decided to leave Agency Y to start her own agency, Katherine actually had a hard time learning whether she was still represented at all.

Remember what I said earlier about the writer’s always being the last to know?

And, to make the situation worse, at the time, a respectable number of editors at major publishing houses had their hot little hands on Katherine’s excellent book. Naturally, she did everything, short of turning up on the doorstep of her NYC agency, to find out what was going on with her contract.

After several highly frustrating weeks of telephone and e-mail tag, she learned that she had only three options: break her contract and sign a new agency agreement with Agency Y, but be assigned to a new agent whom she did not know (and about whom they would tell her nothing); break her contract and sign with Agent X in her new agency, or break her contract and seek representation somewhere else.

While the book was still out with editors. No matter what, her old contract was more or less defunct. Through absolutely no fault of Katherine’s.

Since, like so many of us, Katherine had spent years upon years seeking the perfect agent for her work, none of these possibilities seemed particularly appetizing to her. Option 1 would involve leaving a well-established agency for a brand-new one (which generally means living through months of office-transition disorganization); Option 2 would leave her and her book orphaned until someone at her agency decided to pick her up. And, since she had long experience with querying, Option 3 sounded a lot like putting her hand in a meat grinder for fun. She ended up following her agent – which, if her contract had not been ambiguous, is probably precisely what would have happened anyway.

My point is, unexpected things can happen. If you understand your contract, you will be much better prepared to deal with emergencies as they arise. Again: ask.

I shall wind up my series on agency contracts tomorrow, but in the meantime, a heads-up to those of you who have material out with important agents and/or editors at the moment: the Frankfurter Buchmesse – that’s the Frankfurt Book Fair to those of us stateside – has just ended, which may well mean that the agent or editor who should be reading your manuscript is either on a plane or abroad at the moment. A hefty proportion of the industry’s heavy hitters attend, often grabbing European vacation time on either end.

As a result, guess what piles up on NYC desks every October?

What this could mean for you: a slower response time than usual, in an industry already notorious for slow response times. Don’t panic; I assure you, the delay is not about you or your writing. Sit tight.

And keep up the good work!

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The agency contract, Part II

Yesterday, I started talking about the importance of understanding an agency contract before you sign it — and, indeed, of learning as much as you can about an agency before getting involved with it. Yes, I know: this reads as though I am talking about dating, and in a sense, I am. During the querying process, you are sending your book out on a series of close-to-blind dates, hoping to it will attract an agent. But not every agent is marriage material, if you catch my drift; writer-agent divorces are more common than you might think, usually on the grounds of irreconcilable differences.

Unagented writers don’t seem to talk, or even think, about this possibility much — after so much rejection, anyone who says yes to you can start to look pretty darned good — but let me assure you, amongst agented writers, the differentials between what we had expected our agents to do for us (send our work out promptly, for instance, or return phone calls within a month) and what they have actually done is a CONSTANT source of animated discussion.

My agent, of course, is a treat and a joy and a pleasure. Seriously, she is — and when a client writer can say that with such assurance in the middle of a fairly hair-raising revision on a tight deadline, it may safely be believed. Maybe I just have an unusually affectionate disposition toward people who make efforts on my books’ behalf, but I have to say, amongst the agents of my kith and kin (who are legion and literarily prolific, I am happy to report), my experience with my agent does seem to be a bit, well, anomalous.

I attribute this partially to the fact that writers are very often isolated from one another. If you don’t know another agented writer to ask, how are you going to know what is and isn’t normal in writer-agent relations? (Yet another terrific reason to join a writer’s group, eh?) For instance, it is not at all uncommon for an agent to be very slow — as in months — in getting a contract to a new client. I’ve known writers to be represented contract-less for a year or more.

Is this an indication that the agent who was wild to represent them a few months ago has cooled off? Not usually — but that is of course the first conclusion the writer tends to draw. Most of the time, agents who do this are just disorganized about something which is to them a rather low priority; from their point of view, all that’s important is that you have given them the right to represent your work, and that they have a signed contract with you before you sign a contract with a publisher. Since the signing with agent to signing with publisher time is often lengthy, what’s the rush?

Yet again, we see proof that writers’ sense of urgency (“I must overnight my manuscript!” or “I must make all of the revisions my agent wants by a week from Tuesday!”) does not always correspond with their agents’ (“I’ll send out that contract today…What do you mean, I said that five weeks ago?”) Moral of the story: try not to jump to the worst possible conclusions right away.

The result of this difference in urgency perception is often, alas, some pretty slow agency contract delivery times. Should this happen to you, go ahead and ask for it, if necessary once per month: believe it or not, agents sometimes think it’s been mailed out when it hasn’t.

The other reason that writers end up dissatisfied with their agents, I suspect, is that writers often do not have a firm grasp of either their new agencies’ policies, their agent’s expectations, and/or the provisions of their contracts before they sign. In the white heat of excitement over SOMEONE in the biz loving one’s work, it’s often hard to come up with good questions to ask.

Especially if you have not yet seen the agency contract. It’s in the mail, really.

This is definitely an arena where it is ENTIRELY appropriate to ask what-if questions, ESPECIALLY if you do not have a contract in hand. You will want to know about the normal MO of the agency — commission percentages, length of contract, how they submit to publishers, etc. — but try to work in a question or two about who your contact person will be OTHER than your agent. An assistant? The agency’s principal? The office tabby cat?

Why is this important? Well, if something happens to your agent — a leave of absence, an accident, a move to another agency, or even just not being in the office when a crucial call from an editor comes — the agency will be handling your interests. So you don’t just need to trust your agent — you need to trust your agency as well.

How might this affect you and your work? Well, put on your jammies, boys and girls: it’s story time.

I had been signed with my wonderful, amazing, devoted agent for less than six months when she had a baby. Miracle that she is, she managed to sell my book AND another client’s practically as they wheeled her off to the delivery room, but for some months, it looked very likely that the contract negotiations for my memoir might end up being handled by another agent. As it turned out, another agent held my hand during the rather nerve-wracking period between contract-signing and book delivery — which, in my case, was only about two months.

I think it’s safe to say that I was not always perfectly happy and level-headed during that intensely stressful period. I was lucky that I had been temporarily reassigned by my agency to a delightfully patient and kind listener.

More seriously, I was also still under the care of my interim agent when the first lawsuit threat came. (It came in waves, one in early July, followed by much silence, then another in early September, and a third the following March. Different allegations about the book each time, I might add, and none textually-based.) If my agency were not full of very competent, very supportive people, I might have been left to face the threat unadvised. Having known other writers who have had to deal with lawsuits over their memoirs (hey, I get around) without the help of an agent, I feel very, very fortunate.

And VERY glad that that I read my agency contract very well before I signed it, so I felt secure about the agency that would be taking care of me. Because, as it turns out, this was not a one-time phenomenon: I have a novel teetering on the brink of a sale now (see my post for September 30th, if you missed the big news), and my agent’s second child is due in roughly two and a half months. She and I seem to be on a similarly prolific timetable.

What might have happened, had my agency not been well prepared for this contingency? Let me tell you the story of my friend Lois, a writer of literary fiction. After a year and a half of quite cordial interactions, Lois’ agent just stopped answering her e-mails one day; returned phone calls became a thing of the past. And because Lois was, like so many writers, long trained in assuming that any silence must have something to do with the quality of the book, she naturally fell into hyper-revising mode. Yet when she meekly submitted a new version of her novel, she STILL heard nothing.

“Have I offended my agent somehow?” Lois wondered. After wondering about it for a couple of weeks, she concluded that she must have. She sent a formal (if vague) apology. Still no word.

Weeks dragged on into months, and after three, Lois had had enough. She called the main number for the agency, and demanded to know how she could terminate her contract with the agent. (She had not read her contract closely enough to have that information already, you see. But you know better than that.)

“Wait,” the astonished receptionist told her, “didn’t anybody tell you? She had to have emergency surgery. Poor thing, she’s been in physical therapy for months.”

Of course, Lois felt really small, but actually, I think that the agency should have been the ones apologizing. That many months sans agent, and the agency hadn’t thought to notify her CLIENTS? A quarter of a year can feel like a lifetime to an author whose book is being circulated.

Dear me, I got so carried away with my examples that I haven’t left room to write about contract specifics, so that will be the task of another day. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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What is this agency contract, anyway, and why should I read it?

I’ve been talking for the last few days about the need to look the gift horse of representation offer very carefully in the mouth before you sign anything — and even more carefully before you pay for anything. I’ve been trying to impress upon you, in with my patented brick-through-a-window subtlety, that anytime anyone asks you to pay them to help you advance your writing career, you should be wary. In fairness to the fee-charging agencies I’ve been discussing, they aren’t the only entities a writer should approach with caution.

You should approach signing with ANY agency with caution, armed with as much accurate information you can possibly glean about them. Because, contrary to popular belief and conference-circuit rumor, not all agents — or agencies — are alike. Even at equal levels of prestige, a writer’s experience being represented by one agency may be outrageously different than being represented by another. Expectations and office practices differ. So the more you can know about the agency before you hand your book to it, the better.

Yes, contracts are poorly-written, generally speaking, and it may be intimidating to ask the agent of your dreams probing questions, but it is VITAL that you understand how your new agency works before you sign the representation contract. Don’t assume that your agent will have explained everything important to you before ink hits paper; as I may have mentioned once or twice before, agents are extraordinarily busy people. Very nearly as busy as they think they are, which is saying something. As a group, they tend not to be overly given to explaining themselves or the industry.

Ringing some bells from my last few posts? It should be. This aversion to taking the time to explain the rules to those new to the game is one of the major causes of the assumption I mentioned a couple of days ago, the one about how all talented writers are born with an extra gene that serves as a universal translator for all of the quirks of the industry.

This is not to say that most agents will not answer direct questions — if you leaf through the standard agency guides, you will see that one of the most common dream client traits is the ability to ask good questions. In fact, the problems usually arise when the writer has NOT asked a question where clarification is necessary.

I know, I know: we’re all afraid of being nagging clients. Trust me, when agents talk about nightmare clients, they are talking about writers who call every other day to see if their books have sold yet. Or writers who miss their deadlines. Or even writers who pretend they understand publishing norms that they do not, and end up embroiled in I LOVE LUCY-level complications.

They are not, I assure you, talking about the writer who sends a polite e-mail or calls to say, “Um, when my editor said she wanted my manuscript to be 80,000 — 90,000 words, was that estimated word count, or actual?” (Far from a silly question, incidentally — the difference can be substantial.)

Most agency contracts are easy-in-easy-out affairs, covering either the selling process for a single book or a year’s or two’s time — a choice made by the agency, not the author. Some contracts, however, have a rollover clause, which stipulates that if the author has not notified the agency by a particular date that she wants to seek representation elsewhere, the contract is automatically renewed for the following year.

If you sign with an agency that favors the rollover clause, make sure you know precisely when the opt-out date is. Mark it on your calendar, just in case. And keep marking it every year.

Yes, I know: mistrust is the last thing on your mind when you are thrilled to pieces that a real, live agent wants to represent YOU. But trust your Auntie Anne on this one: honeymoons do occasionally end. Agents move from one agency to another all the time (if this happens, you will need to know with whom you have a contract, the agency or the agent; either is possible), and it’s not unheard-of for an agent to stop representing a particular genre even though she has clients still writing and publishing in it.

This is, in short, one contract to read with your glasses ON, and paper by your side to jot down questions. Then pick up that piece of paper, get yourself to a telephone, and start asking.

And try not to think of it as beginning the relationship on a confrontational note: it’s merely good sense whenever you are going to deal with a business with which you are unfamiliar, and it would never occur to a reputable agent to take your caution at all personally. Because, you see, it is not an individual’s word you are questioning, but a contract drawn up by other people. Naturally, it is in your agent’s best interest for you to understand it well enough to abide by its provisions.

Allow me to repeat that, because it comes as news to a lot of aspiring writers: unless your prospective agent owns the agency, it is the agency — not the agent whom you are prepared to love, honor, and obey for as long as you shall write and she shall sell — who sets the terms of your relationship.

What does that mean, in practical terms? If you are successful, THE AGENCY, AND NOT MERELY THE AGENT, IS GOING TO BE HANDLING EVERY DIME YOU MAKE AS A WRITER.

The agency will be producing those nasty, messily-carboned forms that you will be passing along to the I.R.S.; your publisher will be sending your advance and royalty checks to them, not to you. If your work is going to be sold abroad, the agency will turn your book, your baby, over to a foreign rights agent of ITS selection, not yours — and will be taking a higher percentage of your royalties for those sales than for those in the English-speaking parts of North America, typically.

That’s a whole lot of trust to invest in people who, in many cases, you will never meet face-to-face. Seriously, since almost everything in the biz is handled by phone, e-mail, or snail mail, I know plenty of writers who couldn’t pick their agents, much less the principal of their agency, out of a police line-up. (Not that you really want to be in the position to hiss, “That’s she, officer. SHE’S THE ONE WHO DIDN’T MAIL MY ROYALTY CHECK,” but still.)

So while asking a whole lot of pointed questions at the outset may seem mistrustful, doing so will actually substantially INCREASE the probability that you’re going to trust and respect your agent a year or two down the road. Ideally, you want relationships with both your agent and agency so comfortable that you have no qualms — and no need to have any — about simply handing the business side of your writing over to them and letting them get on with making you rich and famous.

You don’t hear about this much at conferences, but actually, that’s one of the best things about signing with an agent worthy of your trust: you can concentrate on your writing, confident that she’s looking after your interests in the big city.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about what agency contracts do and don’t include, but in the meantime, this seems like a fine opportunity to remind you that soon, I shall be putting together a glossary of industry terms for your easy reference. So please, if there is a term that you would like defined (literary fiction vs. mainstream fiction, anyone?), leave a comment, so I may add it to the list.

Keep up the good work!

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How size matters, part II

I was talking yesterday about the differences between big agencies and small agencies. After I posted it, a small voice in the back of my mind (or perhaps it was in the vast web of psychic connection between me and my readers) kept nagging at me: “Wasn’t that just a tad insensitive? Sure, you had the luxury of choosing between agents, but that was a contest-generated fluke: most aspiring writers query until they’re blue in the face. So where do you get off, suggesting that they limit their choices?”

Here’s where I get off, little voice: I’ve met far too many good writers who focus their queries solely upon the great big agencies, on the theory that only a well-known name is going to be able to represent their work well. It’s just not true. I’ve also knows a whole lot of authors represented by the aforementioned gigantic agencies and “My God, how did you get HIM to read your work?!?” agents who have found themselves desperately unhappy with their representation.

When targeting an agent, I honestly don’t think that the rule should be location, location, location, as though your talent were just looking to park itself on the most expensive piece of Manhattan real estate that will accept it. A far better rule of thumb would be intention, intention, intention — in my experience, writers are MUCH better off if they figure out first what they want from their future agents, and target accordingly.

So, in short, I am writing about agency size in order to give you some background with which to take a radical evolutionary step in how you think about landing an agent: considering not just whether you and your book would be a good fit for the targeted agent, but whether the targeted agent would be a good fit for YOU.

Finding such an agent requires more than researching the profession; it necessitates self-knowledge. What DO you want from your prospective agent, over and above the simple definition of her job, selling her clients’ books to publishers?

If this question sounds vaguely familiar to you long-time readers out there, blame the PNWA. Remember just before conference season, when I asked you to give some good, hard thought to what you want from your agent, over and above representation? And HOW you want to be represented? Querying time is also an excellent period for considering these questions, because agencies – and individual agents – have wildly different representation styles.

Consider very, very carefully how important personal contact is to you, because if this relationship works out, you will be living with your decision for a very long time. Will you go nuts if a month or two goes by silently while an editor has your manuscript, or would you prefer not to hear from your agent until she has concrete news? Would you be happy with the occasional e-mail to answer your questions or keep you updated, or would you prefer telephone calls? Do you want to hear the feedback of editors who have rejected your work, so you can revise accordingly between submissions, or would you rather get through as many submissions as quickly as possible?

Let me let you in on a secret the agented learn very, very quickly: all of these behaviors are very much dependent upon how busy the agent is, and what kind of demands the agency places upon her time. Generally speaking, the bigger the agency, the busier the agent. Similarly, the fewer the agents at an agency, the busier, as a rule.

The second makes immediate sense — a sole proprietorship is obviously more dependent upon one particular agent’s efforts than a communal endeavor, right? — but the big = busy formula is a bit counter-intuitive, isn’t it? Big agencies have greater resources for support staff, whereas in a small agency (or with a stand-alone agent) the agents may be doing support work as well; it would make sense if the small agency agents had less time to lavish on their clients.

However, nowhere is the old adage “tasks expand in direct proportion to the time available to perform them” more evident than in the publishing industry: as an agent becomes more important, he takes on more clients. Big equals powerful here.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. A few “boutique agencies” deliberately keep themselves small in order to occupy a very specific niche, but it is rare. There’s no missing these agencies, by the way — they ALWAYS identify themselves as boutique in their blurbs, lest anyone mistakenly think that they were small because they were unsuccessful. (See earlier comment about big = powerful.) Often, boutique agencies sharply limit the proportion of unpublished writers that they will represent, or do not represent the unpublished at all. They do, however, tend to lavish attention upon the few they do select.

As do, admittedly, some agents at major agencies, but do bear in mind that no matter who represents you, no matter how much your agent loves your work, you will be only ONE of the authors on the agent’s list. Time is not infinitely flexible, despite anyone’s best intentions. Before you commit to a big agency or a major agent, ask yourself: do I really want to be someone’s 101rst client?

This may sound like a flippant question, but actually, it is a very practical one, and one that speaks very directly to your personal level of security about your work. (And no, that’s not a value judgment about the quality of anyone’s writing; very good writers need positive encouragement and support, just like anybody else, especially when they are under the industry’s patented last-minute revision deadlines. But of those, more tomorrow.)

Big agencies and important agents have made their names, generally speaking, on high-ticket clients; often, as I have discussed in recent weeks, that high-recognition client is the reason aspiring writers covet their representation skills. However, it takes time to cater to a bigwig client — that necessarily is not available for Big Agent’s lesser-known clients.

How much time are we talking about? Well, I once had a lovely chat with a past president of AAR who handled one of the biggest mystery writers in the biz. Apart from handling her book negotiations, he told me, he also spent a week with her every winter ensconced in her mountain retreat — not skiing or snowboarding, but micro-editing her next work to make its market appeal as broad as possible.

Yeah, I know. Nice support if you can get it.

Before you float off into fantasies about being successful enough to command your own personal slave editor and/or mountain lodge, stop and think about the implications of being one of this agent’s OTHER clients. That’s a week a year when he is not available to pay even the vaguest attention to the needs of Clients 2 – 143. So who do you think ends up handling those other clients’ concerns? That’s right: not the bigwig agent at all, but his I’m-working-my-way-up-the-ladder assistant agent.

Who, I have it on reliable authority, is somewhat overworked. So how much time do you think the junior agent has to devote to his own clients?
Getting the picture about why a major agency might not always be the best choice for a new writer? Think about it: if Big Agent’s 144th client is actually dealing most of the time with the agent’s junior partner, rather than Mr. Big himself, with whom is the long-term, mutually beneficial interaction occurring? And with whom is the writer building a lifetime relationship?

Clients of small agencies seldom get the mountain-cabin treatment, of course, but just as a matter of time management, an agent who handles 25 clients is usually going to be spending more of it on each than an agent with 100; to stay in business (and agencies go out of business ALL THE TIME), a smaller agency is going to need to sell its clients’ books a bit faster, more lucratively, or both — which, in turn, is often harder for them to do, because they tend to lack the connections.

This pressure can be a significant drawback if your book is a sleeper, or one targeted to a very tight niche market: while a major agent or big agency can afford to keep a client whose books are not selling, a petite agency does not really have that luxury. Being a major agent’s unremunerative pet project may be better for an author than being the slow-selling albatross around a minor’s agent’s neck.

Both of those descriptions, incidentally, could describe exactly the same book. As they say in international relations circles, where you stand depends upon where you sit.

Long-time readers, chant it with me now: it honestly is a good idea to try to get some sense of who your agent is, and what the working conditions are at the agency, beyond the cold statistics of her clients’ sales. This is yet another good reason to go to writers’ conferences and book readings, of course – to meet writers and ask what working with their agents is like.

This practicality is a surprisingly infrequent question at readings, I am astonished to report. Yet who would know better what it’s like to be a writer represented by an agency than a writer who IS represented by that agency? But before you can ask this kind of question fruitfully, you need to figure out what you do and don’t want in your agent.

This is a funny business, you know – the industry is never tired of telling writers that we are a dime a dozen. Yet so are agents, if you think about it. The guides are full of ‘em. You don’t have to attend very many conferences before you meet your first hungry new agent, willing to promise the moon, nor to meet your first 100-client bigwig.

There are a lot of alternatives in between, of course, but the only way you are going to find your best fit is to give some hard thought to what you want and ask good questions until you figure out if the agent who wants you is in fact the best choice for you and your work.

And speaking of your good work: keep it up!

Posted on - 8 Comments on Agencies and AGENCIES

Agencies and AGENCIES

After having spent the last couple of weeks giving you advice on how to track down agents OUTSIDE the standard agency guides, I think it’s only fair for me to spend a post or two talking a bit about the information you can glean from within them. Most guides will give you the same basic information: the agency’s name, address, contact person, member agents, book categories represented, whether they are currently accepting new clients, and preferred method of query.

In short, referring to any of the standard guides will help an aspiring writer avoid the single most common querying mistake, a Dear Agent letter. Almost any guide will give you a specific person to whom to address your query, so do it.

If you have been researching the subject a little, you may have noticed that the standard print guides, such as JEFF HERMAN’S GUIDE TO BOOK PUBLISHERS, EDITORS, & LITERARY AGENTS (where on earth did he come up with such a startlingly original title?) and Writers Digest Book’s GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS (ditto), do not always tell the reader much more than the very basic online guides, such as Preditors and Editors.

Even within an individual guide, listings can vary quite a bit: in the Herman Guide, the questions tend to be geared toward likes and dislikes, in the manner of centerfolds gone by (turn-ons: polite, well-written query letters; turn-offs, synopses rife with misspellings), but in the Writers Digest guide, the agents can say pretty much whatever they want. Or not, as the mood strikes them.

And that, dear friends, is the reason one agency will have a 2-page write-up in a guide while another equally prestigious one will have a scant paragraph. The major book guides rely almost exclusively upon what the agents themselves tell them about themselves on yearly questionnaires, so do be aware that the information you find there, over and above the basic facts of where the agency is located and what they’ve sold, is not always entirely objective.

Some things that writers of my acquaintance have found over the years that these listings may not always be totally objective about: how eager they are to receive queries; how much they enjoy helping new writers build their careers; how quickly they respond to queries; how quickly they respond to submissions; how much they like good writers and good writing (hint: they almost all say that they adore both). It’s not even all that uncommon for a writer to rely upon the specialties listed in these guides, send off a query, and receive in response a huffy form letter, saying the agency hasn’t handled that sort of material in YEARS.

Why should this be the case? Well, the questionnaires the guides send out are fairly long; why not just re-use the responses from last year? (The Herman guide seems to alter the questions slightly from year to year, to make this trick harder; I suspect that this is the reason that fewer agencies are listed there.) Publishing fads change FAST, so the agency hot for chick lit last year may well automatically reject every chick lit query this year. If this happens, don’t waste your energy repining: such a rejection has nothing to do with you or your book. Just cross the agency off your list and move on to the next.

You can – and should – rely upon what the agency listings say they absolutely DON’T want, however. Generally speaking, agencies err on the side of listing too many genres in their guide blurbs, rather than too few, so if they say they aren’t interested in something, they tend to mean it. As in: sending in a query for a type of book that they’ve ever indicated anywhere that they don’t like (even, annoyingly, if an agent has merely stated it in an interview) is a sure way to generate one of those huffy rejection forms.

Don’t say you didn’t hear it here first.

Why would an agency over-list its desired type of books? For the same reason that agents walk into conferences and spout ridiculously broad statements like, “I’m interested in any well-written fiction.” They’re afraid that they’re going to miss out on the next DA VINCI CODE. The smaller the agency, the more likely they are to mis-list; a wide net, they seem to believe, will catch better fish. But really, their agents have personal preferences, just like agents at great big agencies.

Just so you know, no matter what these agency blurbs say, no one represents everything — in fact, they shouldn’t. It would be flatly impossible to have the connections to represent every stripe of book. This is yet another reason it’s an excellent idea to check what an agent or agency has sold recently BEFORE you query: an agent may be as eager as you are to sell your book to a great publisher, but in order to get an editor to read a book, an agent has to be able to catch her attention. It’s simply a fact that it’s SUBSTANTIALLY easier for an agent who has already sold your type of book before to sell your book.

Think of it like eating in a fancy restaurant, where your agent wants to place the order (your book) with a busy wait staff (the editors). Eventually, every diner will probably get service, but some water glasses get refilled faster than others’, don’t they? The staff will take care of their regulars. And if the guy on Table 8 is well-known to be a big tipper, you can bet that half the waiters are going to magically appear by his side the moment he arches an eyebrow.

Obviously, an important agent has an easier time booking lunch dates (no metaphor this time: food, drinks, and/or coffee seems to be integral to the deal-making process) to talk about her clients’ books than someone just starting out. Perhaps less obviously, a junior agent at a big, important agency (like, I am happy to report, the one that represents yours truly, so I know whereat I speak) is often able to use the agency’s wide web of connections in order to get her clients’ work under the right editorial eyes, in a way that sometimes a better-established agent at a smaller agency cannot.

Again, it’s a good idea to check both what the agent and her agency have sold of late.

However, a big agency is not necessarily the right choice for everybody. As the client of a large agency, you do enjoy many benefits: the prestige of signing with a recognized name, more support staff to answer your questions (or not, depending upon how the agency feels about keeping its clients informed), and more collective experience upon which you can draw. Just as with a well-known agent, you are working with a known quantity, with verifiable connections.

With a new agency or new agent, it can be hard to assess connection claims until a track record of sales has been established (see earlier comment about the desirability of checking such things). Sometimes, the hungry can be excellent gambles — if your book sells quickly and/or well, you can be the favorite steed in the shiny, new stable. Before that (and often after), a hungry agent often offers services that a bigger agency or a busier agent might not provide. Extensive free editing, for instance. Intensive coaching through rewrites. Bolstering the always-tenuous authorial ego. If you are a writer who wants a lot of personal attention from an agent, the less busy agent might well be the way to go.

Still, you cannot deny the appeal of the contacts and oomph of a big agency, even if you are not represented by the most important agent in it. Personally, I am represented by a big agency, one that handles more than 300 clients (and very well, too, in my opinion). How much of a difference does it REALLY make, on a practical level? Well, you know how ALL nonfiction book proposals are presented to agents and editors in conservative dark blue or black folders, because a unique presentation is generally regarded as an indicator of a lack of professionalism?

My agency is influential enough to present its clients’ proposals in GRAY folders. Ooh, the power. The pageantry!

Yes, I am very lucky — contrary to what writers conference gurus and get-your-work-published books tell you, luck plays AT LEAST as great a role as talent in determining who gets signed by whom; people who tell you that the only possible reason a writer would have a hard time finding the right agent is lack of talent are either misinformed or misleading — and people in the industry recognize that. When I was deciding between agents, I attended a small writers’ conference in Montana, one of those gloriously intimate ones where perhaps only one agent attends, but you can talk with her for an hour.

Since I already had several irons on the fire, I was not about to be a dog in the manger. I did not approach the agent du jour, except to introduce a writer who I thought would interest her (I’m notorious for doing this; writers are often too shy to introduce themselves). By the end of the conference, the agent had heard that my book had won a major award and, her curiosity piqued, she sought me out to see if I had signed with anyone yet. A couple of minutes into our conversation, I mentioned who I was deciding between, and the agent instantly deflated. “Oh,” she said. “We’re talking THAT league.”

As I said, I have been very lucky: winning the PNWA contest got my work a hearing with many agents in THAT league. (In the unlikely event that I am being too subtle here: entering contests can shave years off the agent-seeking process!) I have also been lucky in that while I enjoy the benefits of a large agency, my agent makes the time to answer my questions and talk with me about my future and current writing: whether our quite-frequent contact is primarily the result of our respectively scintillating personalities or the roller-coaster ride my memoir has been taking on the way to publication, I leave you to speculate.

However, I have to be honest with you, if you write for one of the smaller niche markets, signing with an agent in THAT league may well leave you feeling like a shiny new toy a week after Christmas: the agent may love your book, but between the million-dollar projects and yours, which do you think is the most likely to be set aside for a rainy day? At a smaller agency, or with a less prestigious agent, your work may actually see the light of day faster.

Have I totally confused you, with so many pros and cons? It’s not my intention, I promise – I just want to help you decide how to target your queries to get the outcome you want. Since there are so many agents out there, both listed in the standard guides and not, I could easily spend every day in the year profiling a different one, without ever having time to discuss anything else of interest to writers. So if I can drop a set of sweeping generalities upon you from time to time, to help you navigate amongst the many, many querying choices, I like to do it.

Tomorrow, I shall talk a bit more about how big agency/small agency differences play out for the authors they represent. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on The blessings of Ataraxia, or, How to be a dream client

The blessings of Ataraxia, or, How to be a dream client

I sat down to write about agencies again today, but to be absolutely honest with you, I had to stop halfway through, because I’ve been having a genuinely upsetting day. Since we writers have to be so tough to make it in this business, it’s easy to forget that we are actually finely-balanced musical instruments. It’s hard to create when we’re thrown for a loop. Today’s loop-generator was a fairly common one for givers of feedback, professional and friendly both, so I think it would be useful for me to write about it. (And if not, hey, I blog pretty much every day, so if it turns out that I’m just being self-indulgent today, I can always be purely useful again tomorrow, right?)

Because I am EXTREMELY selective about whose work I read (I have been exchanging chapters with my first readers for years, and professionally, I will only work with clients I feel are bursting with talent, but even then, if the subject matter or genre is not a good fit with my tastes, or if I don’t think I can help a writer get published within a reasonable amount of time, I will refer him on), the vast majority of the time, my interactions with other writers are a joy. Really. I enjoy giving feedback quite a bit, even when I am charged with the task of helping a client incorporate not-very-sound advice from an agent, editor, or dissertation advisor in such a way that it will not destroy the book.

Okay, I’ll grant you, it doesn’t SOUND like a whole lot of fun. But usually, it is: I love good writing, and like any competent editor, the sight of anything that detracts from good writing’s presentation makes me foam at the mouth and reach for a pen.

Every so often, though, I’ll run into someone who thinks I’m just making up the rules of standard format, or norms of academic argumentation, or even the usual human expectation that within a story, each subsequent event will follow logically upon the one before it. (Blame Aristotle’s POETICS for that last set of rules, not me.) This morning, I was lambasted at length for having had the gall to point out that someone’s Chapter Two might not be utterly clear to a reader that did not have the author reading over his shoulder, explaining verbally the choices made on the page.

Long-time readers of this blog, sing along with me here: when you submit a manuscript, all that matters is what is on the page. If ANYTHING in your first 50 pages is not perfectly comprehensible without a “Yes, but I explain that in Chapter Four”-type verbal clarification, rework it.

Please. Thank you.

Now, since it’s my job – or ethical obligation, in cases of volunteer feedback-giving – to point out precisely this sort of problem wherever it appears in a manuscript, I am always a trifle nonplused when I encounter a writer who thinks I’m only flagging it out of some deep-seated compulsion to be hurtful. Again, I am very selective about whose pages I read, and I burn to be helpful: it’s not uncommon for my commentary on a book to be longer as most of the chapters. I try to be thoughtful, giving my reasons for any major suggested change with a specificity and completeness that makes the Declaration of Independence look like a murmur of vague discontent about tea prices.

Obviously, this level of feedback is not for everybody; one of my best friends in the work refers to me affectionately as a manuscript piranha, but still, she lets me read her work. Because, honestly, is there anything worse than handing your work-in-progress to someone who just says, “Oh, it was fine,” or “Oh, it just wasn’t my kind of book,” without explaining WHY? I think completeness of feedback implies a certain level of devotion on my part to making the manuscript in question the best book it can possibly be.

Yet I was told this morning that, to put it mildly, I was incorrect about this. Apparently, I only suggest changes as a most effective means of ripping the author’s heart from his chest, stomping upon it, pasting it back together, sautéing it in a nice balsamic vinegar reduction, then feeding the resulting stew to, if not the author, than at least the neighbor’s Rottweiler.

Imagine my surprise.

This was for a manuscript I LIKED, incidentally. I had made a grand total of ONE suggested change, in the midst of oceans of praise.

So what did I do? What editors and agents moan privately to one another about having to do for their clients all the time, be preternaturally patient until the “But it’s MY work! It MUST be perfect!” tantrum petered out. Until then, further discussion was simply pointless.

Because, in the first moments after receiving critique, creative people are often utterly, completely, fabulously unreasonable about it. They not only want to shoot the messenger – they want to broil her slowly on a spit over red-hot coals like a kabob, and THEN yell at her. Fear of this stripe of reaction, in case you were wondering, is the most common reason most people will give only that very limited “Oh, it was fine” feedback after reading a friend’s manuscript. They’re just trying to keep their heads attached to their bodies, rather than skewered upon some irate writer’s pike.

It’s also the usual excuse — which you may believe or not, as you see fit, considering the source — that most agents give for why they send out form letter rejections, rather than specific, thoughtful replies to requested submissions. Their stated reason for form letter responses to queries, of course, is sheer volume: they don’t have time to reply to each individually. But obviously, if they have the time to read 50 pages, they have time to scrawl a couple of lines about how it could be improved. The fact is, they don’t want to: they don’t want to engender an angry response that might turn into an endless debate about the merits of a book they’ve already decided, for whatever reason, that they do not want.

Since most writers are peaches and lambs and every other kind of pacific, cooperative kind of entity you can think of most of the time, this fear is perhaps overblown. Most of us are perfectly capable of taking a little constructive criticism in the spirit it is intended. But every so often, some author loses it – and for that author’s display of temper, alas, we all pay.

That’s the official logic, anyway.

So now you know: if you want to establish yourself as a dream client in the eyes of the average agent or editor, who tends to hide under a chair after giving even the mildest feedback to her clients, greet the first emergence of any feedback with apparent tolerance; give yourself time to calm down before you argue. To buy yourself time, say something like, “Wow, what an interesting idea. I’ll have to think about that. Thanks.” Then take the rest of the day off, and don’t so much as peek at your manuscript again until you’ve had a chance to calm down.

Say this, even if in that moment, the suggestion proffered seems to you like the worst idea since Hannibal decided to march all of those elephants over the Alps to get at Rome. Because at that precise second, you are not just an individual writer, concerned with the integrity of your own manuscript: you are representing all of us. Show that, contrary to our stereotype in the industry as touchy hotheads unwilling to consider changing a single precious word, most of us really are capable of taking a little criticism.

Admittedly, my readers all acting this beautifully in the fact of critique probably sounds better to me right now than it might had I not just been scathed for trying to help out. Whenever I am confronted with a defensive critique-rejecter, I must confess, I seldom think of cooperative, thoughtful revisers with any abhorrence.

Feedback, though, and the revision process in general, ought to be treated with more respect by everyone concerned. There really ought to be a muse, if not an ancient Greek goddess, of manuscript revision, someone to whom we can pray for patience and tolerance in getting feedback on our work.

A muse of revision might conceivably make better sense to court than a muse of inspiration. Few of us writers like to admit it, but if we write works longer than a postcard, we all inevitably worship in private at this muse’s altar. Why should the initial inspiration gals get all the credit, when so much of the work that makes a book wonderful is in the re-editing?

Editing gets a bad rap, and self-editing even worse. You can’t spend half an hour in a gathering of more than three serious writers without hearing someone bitch about it. Oh, it’s so hard; oh, it’s so tedious. Oh, I’m sick to death of revising my manuscript. If I have to spend another instant of my life reworking that one pesky sentence, I shall commit unspeakable mayhem on the nearest piece of shrubbery.

We don’t describe the initial rush to write that pesky sentence that way, though, do we? Our muse leaps out at us, flirts with us, seduces us so effectively that we look up a paragraph later and find that six hours have gone by. Our muse is the one that gives us that stunned look in our eyes that our loved ones know so well, the don’t-call-me-for-breakfast glaze that tells the neighborhood that we will not be available for normal human interaction for awhile.

Ah, but the muses of initial inspiration don’t always stick around, do they? No, the flighty trollops too often knock you over the head with a great idea, then leave you in the lurch in mid-paragraph. Do they call? Do they write? Don’t they know we worry ourselves sick, we writers, wondering if they are ever going to come back?

Not so Ataraxia, the muse of revision. (Hey, I came up with the notion, so I get to name her. According to the ancient philosopher Sextus Empiricus — I know, I know; you can’t throw a piece of bread at a party these days without hitting someone chatting about Sextus Empiricus, but bear with me here — ataraxia is the state of tranquility attained only at the end of intense self-examination. Ataraxia is the point at which you stop second-guessing yourself: the ultimate goal of revision, no?)

Ataraxia yanks you back to your computer, scolding; she reads over the shoulder of your dream agent; editors at major publishing houses promise her their firstborn. While being a writer would be a whole lot more fun if completing a good book could be accomplished merely by consorting with her flightier muse sisters, party girls at heart, sooner or later, we all need to appeal to Ataraxia for help.

Best to stay on her good side: for starters, let’s all pledge not to scream at the kind souls who give us necessary feedback. Yes, I suspect Ataraxia would really enjoy that sort of sacrifice.

I’ll confess, I have not always treated Ataraxia with respect myself. How tedious revision is, I have thought from time to time, inventing reasons not to sit down and put in a few hours of solid work on a project. What a bore, to have to go back to a book I consider finished and tweak it: hour after hour of staring at just a few sentences, changing perhaps an adjective or two every ten minutes. Yawn.

Over time, though, I have started to listen to what I was actually telling myself when I complained about revision. It wasn’t that I objected to putting in the time; there have been few days in the last decade when I haven’t spent many hours in front of my computer or scribbling on a notepad; I’m a writer, so that’s what I do. It wasn’t that I felt compelled to rework my novel for the fiftieth time, or, in cases where I’ve been incorporating feedback, that I thought the changes would be bad for the book.

No, my real objection, I realized, is that I expected the revision process to bore me to tears. Am I alone in this?

But Ataraxia watches over even the most ungrateful of writers, so she whacked me over the head with an epiphany: a manuscript is a living thing, and to allow it to change can be to allow it to grow in new and exciting ways.

So now I know: whenever I start procrastinating about necessary revisions, it is a pretty sure sign that I had been thinking of my text as something inert, passive, a comatose patient who might die if I inadvertently lopped off too much on the editing table. What if, instead of thinking of revision as nitpicking, I used it to lift some conceptual barriers within the book? What if I incorporated my first readers’ suggestions about my memoir in a way that made the book better? Not just in terms of sentences and paragraphs, but in terms of content?

Just a suggestion: instead of regarding feedback as an attack upon the book, a foreign attempt to introduce outside ideas into an organically perfect whole or a negative referendum upon your abilities as a writer, perhaps it would be more productive to treat critique (your own included) as a hint that maybe the flagged section could use an influx of fresh creativity.

Try to move beyond just making grammatical changes and inserting begrudging sentences where your first readers have asked, “But why is this happening here?” If you have stared at a particular sentence or paragraph for hours on end, changing it and changing it back — c’mon, you know we all do it — naturally, you’re going to get bored. Naturally, you are going to loathe that kind of revision.

But the next time you find yourself in that kind of editing loop, set the text you’re working on aside for a few minutes. Pick up a pen (or open a new document) and write that section afresh, in new words, as if for the first time. No peeking at your old text, and no cheating by using sentences you recall writing the first time around. Allow yourself to use different analogies, to reveal character and event differently. Give yourself time to play with your ideas and the way you want to say them before you go back to the original text.

Then walk away for ten minutes. Maybe you could do some stretching exercises, to avoid repetitive strain injuries, or at least take a stroll around your house. Feed the cat. Plot a better way to get legions of elephants over the Alps. Anything to get your eyes off the printed word for awhile.

And then, when you return, read the original version and the new. You probably will not want to substitute one for the other entirely, but is there any part of the new version that could be incorporated into the old in an interesting way? Are there sentences that can be switched productively, or some new ones that could be added to the old? Are there arguments or character points in the new that would enliven the old?

What you’re doing with this exercise is transforming revision from a task where you are fine-tuning something essentially finished into an opportunity to infuse the manuscript with fresh ideas at problematic points. Conceptually, it’s a huge difference, and I guarantee it will make the revision process a lot more fun.

As Ataraxia wants it to be, I suspect.

Okay, I feel less self-indulgent now: I think I have wrested some good, practical advice out of my very, very bad day. And naturally, unlike your garden-variety agent or editor, I’m not going to give up on this writer because of a single loss of temper. Nor, unlike the average writer’s friend with a manuscript, am I going to let the one writer who implied that my feedback on his work was the worst idea since Stalin last said, “I know! Let’s have a purge!” discourage me from giving feedback to others.

But please, the next time you are confronted with feedback that makes your blood boil, take a deep breath before you respond. Think about me, and about Ataraxia, and force yourself to say, “Gee, what an interesting notion. May I think about it, and we can talk about it later?” Then go home and punch a pillow 700 times, if you must, but please, don’t disembowel the messenger.

She may be bringing you a news flash from Ataraxia. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Personality in the query letter

Personality in the query letter

Loyal reader MooCrazy posted an excellent question a while back, one that I thought deserved treatment at length. It’s been a hectic week, though, so it’s taken me a bit to get back to it. Here is her question, slightly abridged:

“I think of a query letter as very brief and business-like, not a place for my natural irreverence to burst forth. But I would be wrong about that, I bet. Please suggest how to convince an agent or editor that one’s work appeals to readers’ sense of humor without coming across as unprofessional or downright silly. The voice that comes naturally to me when writing narrative deserts me when composing business letters or even these questions to you. Any pointers on what sort of self-talk I should engage in to overcome this inhibition?”

Moo, I love this question, because it cuts right to the heart of the conflict between making your submission materials ultra-professional vs. conveying enough of your personality (and your book’s) to attract an agent with a worldview similar enough to yours that you can work together happily for a decade or three. And I’m going to be honest with you here: 99% of the selling-your-writing guides will tell you flatly that your query letters should be NOTHING but professional, mere variations on a very distant, business-like theme.

In short, 99% of the guidance out there will tell you to make your query letter exactly like every other writer’s who pays attention to them. I think that this is a serious mistake, when you are trying to stand out in the crowd.

Let me show you why. I go to a lot of conferences all over the country, so I meet many, many agents trolling for clients. A few years ago, I heard a relatively new agent give a demonstration of what it is like to go through an hour’s worth of query letters — not the dozens of hours a week an agency screener actually spends upon them, mind you, but just long enough to give us a sense of what did and did not work. She read us real query letters aloud (sans names, of course), asking after each one: “Would you ask to see the first 50 pages?”

Most illuminating. As you might expect, about 80% of them were not professional enough to be seriously considered, because they did not meet the minimum standard for a successful business letter: they either did not say what they wanted (you’d be amazed how few query letters mention that the author is seeking representation), why they were soliciting that particular agent (a pet peeve at agencies everywhere), what the book was about, what the book’s category was, or why anyone might conceivably might want to read it. Boasts abounded (a recurring favorite: “This is the next (insert name of bestseller here)!”), as did, surprisingly enough, not-so-veiled threats (“You’ll be sorry if you pass up this opportunity.”) Too many people mistake pushiness, wild enthusiasm, and exaggeration for sales technique.

And all of these were the ones who remembered to include a SASE. Next!

Now, perhaps I place too much faith in my readers in general (and you in particular, Moo), but I’ve gone over the art of query-writing enough here that I like to think that none of you would make these particular stripes of mistakes. (If you’re new to this blog, check out the QUERYING category to the right.) As you say, Moo, those of us who realize that writing is a business know better.

However, businesslike need not mean cold or boring — or that you need to utilize the turgid clichés of the standard business letter. The query-reading agent made this point beautifully: after 45 minutes of hearing, “enclosed please find…” and “thank you for your prompt attention to this matter,” believe me, everyone in the room was starting to feel quite resentful that people gifted enough to write an entire book couldn’t come up with more original ways to convey these necessary business sentiments. We wanted to slap them into being more colorful.

Obviously, you will want to stick to some business norms: keep the letter to a single page; list the full name and address of the agent above the greeting; greet the agent as “Dear Ms. X” or “Dear Mr. Y”, rather than by the first name (if you have any doubt whatsoever about the sex of your intended recipient, call the agency and ask the receptionist.); include your contact information either in the header or below the signature; add an “enclosed” notation at the bottom, noting what materials are in the package. If you are concerned about goading an agent into rage by the fact that you’re sending out many queries simultaneously (which most agents will automatically assume you are, incidentally), add “simultaneous submissions” under the “enclosed” notation.

You should not, however, use business format to the extent that you do not indent your paragraphs. This is a literate business, so many agency screeners draw unkind inferences about writers who do not indent, the nasty thoughts generally reserved for those who cannot spell. Nor should you be so formal that you don’t sound like an interesting person.

The presenting agent illustrated this last point very effectively, too. After about 55 minutes of mostly rejectable examples, she read us a query that was at first blush absolutely perfect. It did positively everything that the guides tell writers to do: it told the agent why he had picked her, what his book was about, the target market, and a little about the writer’s publication record. It ended with a polite thank-you for taking her time, and included a SASE.

She held this sterling document high in the air. “Who can tell me why I rejected this?”

Since I had a lot of experience reading queries, my hand shot in the air, but everyone else in the room looked at one another, puzzled. If we had been in a cartoon or a comic book, a huge thought bubble would have been hanging over the audience, reading, “But I know I’ve sent out queries identical to that! My God, what did I do wrong?”

By this time, I was practically jumping up and down in my seat, dying to put them out of their collective misery. Smiling, the agent pointed at me, and I said, “It’s a man without a face. It could have been written by positively anybody – or copied practically word for word from half the writers’ marketing guides on the bookshelf.”

“Bingo,” the agent said.

From the writer’s point of view, this seems like a mean trick, doesn’t it? You can do everything right — and STILL be rejected! It’s not just a matter of boring the agent — although, since advice-giving books have made good writers’ query letters so VERY similar, that’s a big part of it. Do you really want your missive to sound exactly like 20 others the agent’s seen that week?

But if you think about the kind of a relationship the query letter is intended to solicit, it quickly becomes clear why an infusion of personality is necessary: yes, you and your agent will be doing business together, but this is also the person you will be trusting to handle your baby. This is the person who is going to be giving you some of the best and worst news of your life; this is the person with whom you will be sharing the joys and sorrows of the rest of your career. Your successes will be his successes.

This is not just any business relationship: it’s a personal one, too.

So tell me: if you were in the agent’s shoes, would you prefer to anticipate spending the next 30 years communicating with a man without a face, a perfectly businesslike automaton, or an interesting, funny, complex person?

Moo, if you are lucky enough to be funny, and can convey that in writing, believe me, your chosen agent is going to want to know about it as soon as possible. And it’s in your interest, too: would you really want to end up with an agent without a sense of humor? Or someone who doesn’t want to accept you the way you are?

I know that I’ve been comparing the querying process to dating quite a bit over the last month, but honestly, the last thing I would advise an interesting writer to do is to suppress her personality in her query letter, any more than I would encourage someone I liked to misrepresent herself on a date. And that goes double for the author bio. If you’ve been brave enough to lead an offbeat life, celebrate it!

It can only make you more memorable, if you’ve presented your work in a businesslike manner. Generally speaking, the more of the flavor of your book you can convey in the cover letter, the better.

So YES, Moo, I would HIGHLY encourage you to make your query letter as funny as your book! Wouldn’t you like your letter to be the one in the last three hundred that puts a smile on your dream agent’s face? Genuine comic talent is rare. And if you were an agent looking for comedy, wouldn’t you be THRILLED to receive a query letter that was genuinely amusing, for a change?

And that concludes my pep talk du jour, dearly beloved. Keep up the good work!

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Preparing to talk with an agent, Part II

On Thursday, I broached the seldom-discussed subject of how to talk to an agent who wants to sign you, a situation I devoutly hope all of you will be facing very soon. Today, I want to go into the logic behind the two major submission strategies favored by agents, individual submissions and multiple submissions, and how the strategy pursued by your agent can affect you and your book. Individual submissions are far and away the more common choice for fiction, so I shall discuss it first.

Let’s assume that you have already signed with Agent X and revised your manuscript to within an inch of its life at X’s behest. Once Agent X is satisfied with the work to be submitted (and be prepared, everyone: getting it into submittable shape can take months or even years; “How much revision do you typically do with your authors before submitting?” might be a good question to ask in advance), then she will pitch your work to an editor — via phone, lunch, coffee, chance meeting at the local deli, the odd conversation at an alumni club meeting, etc. — and if the editor sounds interested, your manuscript or book proposal will wend its way to the editor’s desk.

I would like to report that once there, it is instantly pounced upon and eagerly read by the editor, but in all likelihood, it will sit there for a while, twiddling its papery thumbs in a pile with other bored manuscripts. Here is where your agent’s persistence will really pay off: a good agent who cares about a project will keep on nagging unmercifully until your manuscript gets read.

How long can it sit there? Well, it depends. Several months is common, but would you throw something at your monitor if I told you a year is not unheard-of for an individual submission? After all, the editor knows no one else is seeing it, so it’s automatically a lower priority than the submissions with a deadline, right?

This is not, in short, a situation where anyone concerned should be holding her breath, waiting for a response.

Please do be aware, though, that with individual submissions, long waits do not necessarily mean bad news. I know writers who have had good books held by editors for over a year — both books that the editor eventually acquired and books that the editor rejected. If the editor just dislikes the writing style, that will probably be determined quickly: often, an editor (or, more commonly, his assistant) will read the first few pages of a submitted manuscript fairly shortly after receiving it to see if there’s any chance at all at he might want to acquire it. If the answer is no, trust me, it will be off his desk in a hurry.

What will NOT happen, however, is that a book will be rejected and STILL remain sequestered in editorial files. Nor will it be read and set aside to think about. Almost universally, long waits are attributable to your book’s not having been read yet, at least by the person empowered to make an actual decision, not to his trying to make up his mind between a couple of projects. (Although, to be fair, at most houses, several people will have to read the book before it lands on the desk of the decision-maker, and that, too, takes time.)

From the writer’s point of view of course, these delays are maddening – all the more so, because the writer is almost never told what is going on with the book during these delays. The only sane response is to leave the whole matter in your agent’s hands and start working on your next book, but few among us have that kind of sang froid, alas.

In my case, while my novel is making the rounds of publishers, I have a memoir that might conceivably be coming out within the foreseeable future, my next novel to complete, my editing business to run, and this blog to write: I certainly have plenty to do. Yet even I find myself wondering if the manuscript of my novel will sit so long in one place that the paper will spontaneously produce leaves, acorns, perhaps even an entire tree. Someday, will archeologists be trying to estimate the age of my manuscript by its rings? Or in geological time, if it petrifies?

This is, of course, the primary drawback to individual submissions of a manuscript. “Aha! “ I hear you cry, “then I should press my agent-to-be for multiple submissions!”

Well, not necessarily. Multiple submission (also known as simultaneous or mass submission) is, as the name implies, when your book or book proposal is sent to many editors at once. Nonfiction is very often sold this way, as is any book expected to generate sufficient interest for an auction. Your agent will pitch your book (over the phone or the aforementioned comestibles), the editor will express interest, your book or book proposal will be sent, and this process is repeated with your agent’s entire A-list of editors.

The advantage of this is that interest from several editors can engender a bidding war. The threat of another editor’s scooping up the next hot thing can also speed up the reading process considerably. The disadvantage, however, is that it makes your book very subject to the winds of gossip. If half the editors say no, the other half will probably hear about it.

Yes, New York is a big city, but in many ways, its publishing world is a small town. Your agent’s assistant probably went to college with assistants of a couple of the editors who will see your book. People talk. If one editor makes an offer, you can bet your boots that she will mention it to people she knows. Similarly, if she turned down a book an agent was pitching as the best read since the Declaration of Independence, she’s likely to mention it to her chums. As a result, books can go from very hot to very not in a matter of days.

For those of us who reside in more laid-back portions of the country, the speed of Manhattanite collective changes of mind can be dizzying, if not downright odd. Why, we Pacific Northwesterners wonder, does everyone want the same thing at the same time? Surely, the book market is more complex than that?

I wish I could explain this phenomenon, my friends, but I can no more explain fads in the book market than I can fads in fashion. Why is it that when you walk into an NYC publishing house, for instance, all of the editorial assistants will be dressed more or less the same? Beyond me. But remember those beach-combing New Yorkers I told you about? Same mentality.

Don’t try to reason it out more than that: it is one of the great mysteries of life, like the origin of evil and why the line you chose at the supermarket always moves more slowly than the others. Just look out your window at the Pacific Northwest verdure, reflect that you can probably see more trees from your office window than are in the entirety of Central Park, and reconcile yourself to regional differences in character. Remember that you perplex them, too.
So, too, should you regard the mystery of the alternation of glacially-slow reading times and we-need-you-to-overnight-your-changes urgency. Panic and apathy often seem to be the only two possible states of being. It might occur to you, living in an environment where the air is breathable, that it would in fact be theoretically possible for agents and editors to come up with a temporal plan, where one event follows another in a logical manner, and deadlines may be met with the calm tranquility that only comes from advance preparation.

Take my advice: don’t try to present this quaint view to people in the New York-based publishing industry, lest you be labeled a West Coast Flake. Instead, just take quiet steps to insure your own inner peace and personal tranquility, and let them get on with their heart-stopping perpetual panic.

And no, I am not talking about meditation: I’m talking about adding two weeks to any negotiated deadline, so you may finish making your changes without losing too much sleep. I’m talking about pretending that FedEx does not serve your remote part of the country; the USPS’ Priority mail is more than fast enough for a manuscript that will sit on an editor’s desk until the next Ice Age.

My point here (and I’m relatively sure that I still have one) is that the more you know about your prospective agent’s preferred solicitation style up front, the more stress you will be able to save yourself down the line. Will you be dealing in the geological timeframes of individual submissions, or the live-or-die gamble of multiple submissions? Either way, get a solid explanation now, before the panic begins, because honey, trying to get an explanation from a Manhattanite agent in the middle of a panic is like Dorothy trying to talk strategy with the cyclone that landed her in Oz.

Learn what you can first, then hold on for the ride. And wherever you are in the process, keep up the good work!