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Book Marketing 101: how much does size matter, really?

Last time, I mentioned that, contrary to what many aspiring writers seem to believe, a great big agency is not necessarily the best choice for any particular book, any more than signing with just any agent is a sure path to publication. While queriers, understandably, tend to focus on how picky agents are about what projects they take on, it’s worth giving some serious thought at the query list-generating stage to what kind of agency — and agent — is most likely to have the connections not only to sell your book well, but to walk you through the often difficult and perplexing publication process.

So while admittedly every agency — and indeed, every agent — is different, let’s spend the day wallowing in some sweeping generalities about size, shall we?

I am certainly not the first to write on this topic, nor, I suspect, the last. Writers’ periodicals seem to have an especial fondness for the issue — so much so that I sometimes wonder if a visiting alien picking up a writers’ magazine would not automatically assume that every writer in America chooses representation based upon size alone.

It’s a big country, the alien might reason. They like EVERYTHING big.

There are, of course, some reasons for this preference — and not just because it’s kind of cool when you mention your agency at writers’ conferences or industry parties and people say, “Oh!” as if they’ve just learned that you won the silver medal in pole-vaulting two Olympics ago.

Although admittedly, that’s gratifying.

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 prevailing attitudes), and often more collective experience upon which you can draw. Just as with a well-known agent, in going with a major agency of good repute, you are working with a known quantity, with verifiable connections.

Emphasis on connections. Read Publishers Weekly or Publishers Marketplace for even a couple of months — not a bad idea, if you intend to stick with the writing gig for the long haul — and you’re likely to notice the same agency names turning up again and again, coupled with particular publishing houses. Agencies do specialize, and obviously, it’s in a writer’s interest to be affiliated with one of the top agencies for her book category.

Even when an agency does not focus on a particular category to the exclusion of others, the agents within it often will — and that, too, sets a discernable pattern. It’s not at all uncommon for an editor who likes an agent’s literary tastes to buy books from several of his or her clients.

Which makes a certain amount of empirical sense, right? As we’ve seen through querying, there isn’t universal agreement across the industry about what constitutes good writing, even within a single book category. Individual tastes differ, and what one editor at Random House likes to see in a mainstream novel will not necessarily be what another is seeking. If Editor Sam already knows from past acquisitions that she likes the kind of books that Agent Maureen enjoys, Sam is probably going to be more open to a pitch from Maureen than one from Agent Joe, who hasn’t sold her a book before.

Remind yourself of this dynamic, please, the next time you hear an agent say at a conference that a particular kind of book can’t be sold anymore. Translation: he would have trouble selling it to his already-established editorial connections.

With a new agency, it can be harder to assess connection claims until a track record of sales has been established. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s not uncommon for a successful agent to break off and form her own agency, taking her connections — and often her clients as well — with her.

(This is one reason why, in case you were wondering, I like the Publishers Marketplace database so much — you can look up agents by name, not just by agency, so you can see how their representation preferences change as they move around. An agent with a passion for SF might not be able to give free rein to it as the junior agent at an agency that specializes in mysteries, but might well have leapt into SF after a promotion or move elsewhere.)

But that doesn’t mean that other brand-new agencies may not be worth your while. Sometimes, the hungry can be excellent gambles — they are often more energetic in pursuing sales. And lest we forget (because it’s not mentioned much at writers’ conferences, for some reason), how many of the big agents initially established themselves in the industry was by taking a chance on an unknown client who turned out to be a major author.

Something to think about: if your book sells quickly and/or well, you can be the favorite steed in the shiny, new stable. Which probably means you and your work will get more attention than with a similar achievement at a larger agency, where you would be just one of their in-house stars.

Even before that (and often after), a hungry agent often offers services that a bigger agency or a busier agent might not provide. Intensive coaching through rewrites, for instance. Bolstering the always-tenuous authorial ego. Extensive free editing. (If you missed my earlier posts on FEE-CHARGING AGENTS, or you are unfamiliar with how much freelance editing can cost, you might want to check out the category at right before you discount the value of such an offer.)

This is more a matter of math than a matter of nice: an agent with 10 clients is going to have a lot more time to devote to these helpful services than an agent with 80. 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.

Does it seem presumptuous to think about what an agent can offer you, rather than what you can offer an agent? To the kind of thoughtful querier who knows better than to send out rude letters that say things like, “This is the next bestseller!” it often does. (Begging for attention for a good long while can do that to you.)

But think about it: if you are a writer lucky enough to garner multiple representation offers — and let’s all keep our fingers crossed for that — do you really want to realize with a shock that you do not have any criteria for picking an agent other than the willingness to say yes to you?

Stop laughing — established authors don’t admit this much, but this is not an uncommon dilemma for good writers to face. It certainly happened to me. I received offers from three agents, each of whom was apparently a nice person AND I had researched enough to know that each had a dandy track record selling the kind of book I had been pitching them — and I was stunned to recognize that I was utterly unprepared to judge them on any other basis.

Fortunately, I had many agented friends eager to offer me advice. But that’s a luxury not every writer has.

So believe me when I tell you: giving some advance thought to what you want from your future agent, over and above the willingness and ability to sell your book, is not a symptom of creeping megalomania. It’s a means of coming to understand the value of your work and how it might conceivably fit into the already-existing literary world.

It can also, to descend from the heady heights of hope for a moment, give you some solid clues about how to prioritize a large potential query list. It would be prudent, for instance, to 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, for instance, go nuts with speculation if an editor has your manuscript — and you haven’t heard from your agent in a month? Many writers would, you know — I’ve heard justifications by authors of manuscripts that have been sitting on an agent’s desk for 4 or 5 months that positively rival the tales of the Brothers Grimm for invention.

(The actual reason a writer hasn’t heard back tends not to be all that interesting, by comparison: typically, if you haven’t been told yea or nay, the submission has yet to be read. The paperweight was invented for a reason, you know: to keep bits of unread manuscripts from migrating all over agents’ and editors’ desks.)

Once you have established where you fall on the update-need continuum, there are other questions to ask yourself. Do you want to hear the feedback of editors who have rejected your work, so you can revise accordingly, or would you rather get through as many submissions as quickly as possible? Would you prefer an agent who wants to micro-manage your book proposal, or would you be happier with one who leaves more of the writing decisions to you?

How prone are you to ask questions or take concerns to your agent? When you do, would you be happy with the occasional e-mail to answer your questions, or would you prefer telephone calls? (If you live outside the United States, this last question is even more essential: the farther away you reside, the less likely it is that you will ever meet your agent face-to-face, right? Many small agencies would not be able to afford unlimited international phone calls.)

The answers to all of these 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.

Seems a bit counter-intuitive, doesn’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 were busier.

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 mistaking these agencies — they ALWAYS identify themselves as boutique in their blurbs, lest anyone mistakenly think that they were small because they were unsuccessful. Often, they 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 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.

So before you set your heart upon a big agency or a major agent, it’s a good idea to ask yourself: do I really want to be someone’s 101rst client?

This sounds 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. Big agencies and important agents have made their names, generally speaking, on high-ticket clients; often, that high-recognition client is why aspiring writers covet their representation skills.

However, it takes time to cater to a bigwig client. 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 a year with her in a mountain retreat — not skiing, but micro-editing her next work to make its market appeal as broad as possible.

Nice perq of fame, isn’t it? Beulah, peel me a grape.

Before you float off into fantasies about being successful enough to command your own personal slave copyeditor 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 most fleeting 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. Who, I have it on reliable authority, is somewhat overworked — and, if his last few assistants’ career trajectories are any indication, may well move on to become a full agent at another agency within the next year or two.

Which raises an interesting question: if a writer is actually dealing most of the time with the agent’s assistant, rather than the agent, with whom is the long-term, mutually beneficial interaction occurring?

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 admittedly egocentric opinion).

How much of a difference does it make on a practical level, you ask? Well, do you remember earlier in this series, when I was talking about 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.

And if the glamour of THAT doesn’t impress you, perhaps this will: each time I’ve handed them a book proposal, they’ve been able to garner an offer within two months — lightning speed, in this industry — because they had the right connections to place MY work under the right sets of editorial eyeballs.

Ultimately, it’s going to take more than enthusiasm about your project for an agent to sell your first book. It’s going to take connections — the right connections for your project. 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. It’s in your interests to look beyond the generalities.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: there’s no such thing as an agency that’s perfect for every single conceivable book. This process is — or should be — about finding not just acceptance, but forming the best possible alliance with someone who is going to help you build a career as a writer.

Give some hard thought to how you want to be supported on that path, and make your querying choices accordingly. Keep up the good work!

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Book marketing 101: but what if I just walk up and ask?

While I was on the subject of tracking down who represents whom, so that you may query agents who represent books similar to yours, I thought I would make a slight detour to an agent-finding strategy favored by the bold: walking up to a published writer (or a pre-published but agented one) and simply saying, “Do you mind if I ask who represents you?”

Writers tend to be nice people; they’re often very happy to give a spot of advice and encouragement to someone new to the game.

Given how VERY useful responses to this question can be for aspiring writers, it’s kind of astonishing how infrequently one hears it at author readings. But really, “Who represents you, and how did you land your agent?” almost always elicits a response that’s interesting enough to entertain the non-writers in the audience, too.

Kinda changes the way you think of author readings, doesn’t it?

If you live in or near a big city with some good bookstores, chances are very good that there are readings going on somewhere in town practically every day of the week. And trust me, if you walk into the best bookstore in town, saunter up to the register or information desk, and ask for a calendar of readings, the staff will be OVERJOYED to direct you to one. Or put you on a mailing list.

Here in Seattle, we’re pretty lucky: not only do we have several very good independent bookstores that regularly host readings and signings, but we also have the Stranger, a free newspaper that routinely lists all of the author readings for any given week, along with brief summaries of their books. (Possibly because the editor won the PEN West award for a memoir a few years back.)

When you’re agent-hunting, it’s usually more worth you while to go to readings by first-time authors than people whose names have graced the bestseller lists for quite some time. Often, new authors are downright grateful to anyone who shows up, and doubly so to anyone who asks an interesting question. They’re usually pretty grateful to their agents, too, and thus like to talk about them.

As a fringe benefit, they will often blandish their local writer friends — publishers’ publicity departments generally ask authors for lists of cities where they have lots of friends, and set up readings accordingly — into attending their readings, just so someone shows up. Sometimes, these helpful friends are willing to tell you who their agents are, and what they represent.

Seriously, it’s worth a try. To be blunt about it, you’re far more likely to garner an actual recommendation to query a new author’s agent than from an established author, especially if you listen politely, laugh at the jokes in the reading, and hang out to talk afterward.

Why do the established tend to be more stand-offish about it, you ask? Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not usually because they’re mean. Just experienced.

Let’s revisit some of the characters from my long-ago Industry Faux Pas series who gamely walked up to published authors and asked for their help. The etiquette in this situation can be a little murky — after all, these authors need to regard anyone who approaches them at a reading as a potential book buyer, and thus may come across as friendlier than they intend — but these examples should help you steer around potential road blocks.

Enjoy!

Because the road to recognition is usually so very long and winding, many savvy writers seek to speed things up a trifle by enlisting the help of already established – or already agented – writers on their behalf. This is not a bad idea – but, like everything else, there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way.

Come with me now to the land of hypotheticals, to explore the latter.

Writer-approaching scenario 1: Isabelle notices in her local paper that Ignatz, a writer whose work is similar to hers and is aimed at the same target market will be giving a reading at a local bookstore. She makes a point of attending the reading, and during question time, stands up and asks point-blank who represents him – couching the question within a request for permission to use him as a query reference. Ignatz laughs uncomfortably, tells an agent-related anecdote, and when she presses for a name, tells her to see him afterward.

Isabelle waits patiently until all those who have bought books have presented them to Ignatz for signing, then repeats her question. “I haven’t read your book,” she tells him, “but from the reviews, our work has a lot in common.”

Ignatz, professional to the toes of his well-polished boots, casts only a fleeting glance at her empty hands before replying. “I’m sorry,” he says, “my agent has asked me not to refer any new writers to him.”

What did Isabelle do wrong? (And, for extra credit, what about Ignatz’s response marks it as a brush-off, rather than a simple statement of his agent’s feelings on the subject?)

Isabelle committed two cardinal sins of author approach. First, she did not evince ANY interest in Ignatz’s work before asking him for a favor – and a fairly hefty favor, at that. She did not even bother to buy his book, which is, after all, how Ignatz pays his rent. But since he is quite aware, as any successful writer must be, that being rude to potential readers may mean lost business down the line, he can hardly tell her so directly.

So he did the next best thing: he lied about his agent’s openness to new clients.

How do I know he lied? Experience, my dears, experience: had his agent actually not been accepting new clients, his easiest way out would have been simply to say so, but he did not. What he said is that his agent asked HIM not to recommend any new writers; a subtle difference.

Most agents rather like it when their clients recommend new writers; it saves the agent trouble, to use the client as a screener. So, generally speaking, if an agented writer says, “Oh, my agent doesn’t like me to recommend,” he really means, “I don’t like being placed in this position, and I wish you would go away.”

How has Isabelle placed Ignatz in a tough position? Because she has committed another approach faux pas: she asked for a reference from someone who has never read her work — and indeed, didn’t know she existed prior to that evening.

From Ignatz’s point of view, this is a no-win situation. He has absolutely no idea if Isabelle can write – and to ask to see her work would be to donate his time gratis to someone who has just been quite rude to him. Yet if he says yes without reading her work, and Isabelle turns out to be a terrible writer (or still worse, a terrible pest), his agent is going to be annoyed with him. And if he just says, “No, I don’t read the work of every yahoo who accosts me at a reading,” he will alienate a potential book buyer.

So lying about his agent’s availability is Ignatz’s least self-destructive way out. Who can blame him for taking it?

Let’s say that Isabelle has learned something from this encounter. Manuscript in hand, she goes to another reading.

Writer-approaching scenario 2: Isabelle spots another reading announcement in her local newspaper. This time, it’s an author whose work she’s read, Juanita; wisely, she digs up her dog-eared copy of Juanita’s first novel and brings it along to be signed, to demonstrate her ongoing willingness to support Juanita’s career. She also brings along a copy of her own manuscript.

After the reading, Isabelle stands in line to have her book signed. While Juanita is graciously chatting with her about the inscription, Isabelle slaps her 500-page manuscript onto the signing table. “Would you read this?” she asks. “And then recommend me to your agent?”

Juanita casts a panicked glance around the room, seeking an escape route. “I’m afraid I don’t have time to read anything new right now,” she says, shrinking away from the pile of papers.

This, believe it or not, happens even more that the first scenario – and with even greater frequency at writers’ conferences. Just as some writers have a hard time remembering that agents have ongoing projects, lives, other clients, etc. whose interests may preclude dropping everything to pay attention to a new writer, so too do established writers – many, if not most, of whom teach writing classes and give lectures in order to supplement their incomes.

So basically, Isabelle has just asked a writing teacher she has never met before to give a private critique of her manuscript for free. Not the best means of winning friends and influencing people, generally speaking.

Yes, the process of finding an agent is frustrating, but do try to bear in mind what you are asking when you request help from another writer. Just as querying and pitching necessarily cuts into your precious writing time, so do requests of this nature cut into established writers’ writing time. Other than your admiration and gratitude, tell me, what does the author who helps you get out of it?

This not to say that some established writers don’t like to offer this kind of help; many do. But even the most generous person tends to be nonplused when total strangers demand immense favors. Establishing some sort of a relationship first – even if that relationship consists of nothing more than the five-minute conversation about the author’s work that precedes the question, “So, what do you write?” – is considered a polite first step.

In other words: whatever happened to foreplay?

This particular set of problems is not discussed much on the conference circuit – or, to be precise, they are not discussed much in front of contest attendees; they are discussed by agents, editors, and authors backstage at conferences all the time, I assure you, and in outraged tones.

Why? Because, alas, for every hundred perfectly polite aspiring writers, there are a handful of overeager souls who routinely overstep the bounds of common courtesy – and, as I can tell you from direct personal experience, it’s not always easy being the first personal contact a writer has with the industry: one tends to be treated less as a person than as a door or a ladder.

And no one, however famous or powerful, likes that. Case in point:

Writer-approaching scenario 3: at a writers’ conference, Karl meets Krishnan, a writer who has recently acquired an agent. The two men genuinely have a great deal in common: they live in the same greater metropolitan area, write for the same target market, and they share a love of the plays of Edward Albee. (Don’t ask me why; they just do.) So after hanging out together in the bar that is never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference venue, it seems perfectly natural for Karl to e-mail Krishnan and ask him to have coffee the following week.

Within minutes of Krishnan’s arrival at the coffee shop, however, he is dismayed when Karl pulls a hefty manuscript box out of his backpack. “Here,” Karl says. “I want to know what you think before I send it to the agents who requested it at the conference. And after you read it, you can send it on to your agent.”

Krishnan just sits there, open-mouthed. As soon as his cell phone rings, he feigns a forgotten appointment and flees.

Okay, what did Karl do wrong here?

Partially, he echoed Isabelle’s mistake: he just assumed that by being friendly, Krishnan was volunteering to help him land an agent. However, there are a LOT of reasons that industry professionals are nice to aspiring writers at conferences, including the following, listed in descending order of probability:

*Krishnan might have just been being polite.

*Krishnan might have regarded Karl as a potential buyer of his books, and as such, did not want to alienate a future fan.

*Krishnan might have been teaching a class at the conference, or hoping to do so in future, and wanted to make a good impression.

*Krishnan is lonely – writing is a lonely craft, by definition, right? — and is looking for other writers with whom to commune.

*Krishnan is looking for local writers with whom to form a critique group.

*Krishnan’s agent might have asked him to be on the lookout for new writers at the conference (rare, but it does happen occasionally).

Of these possibilities, only the last two would dictate ANY willingness on Krishnan’s part to read Karl’s work – and the next to last one definitely implies that reading would be exchanged, not one-way. However, if either of the last two had been Krishnan’s intent, it would have been polite for Karl to wait to be ASKED.

Ditto with Karl’s request that Krishnan pass the manuscript on to his agent. Even with a super-open agent, an agented author cannot recommend others indiscriminately. At minimum, it could be embarrassing. If Krishnan recommends Karl, and Karl turns out to be a bad writer, a constant nuisance, or just plain nuts, that recommendation will seriously compromise his ability to recommend writers in future.

That’s right: writers like Karl, while usually well-meaning in and of themselves, collectively make it harder for everyone else to get this kind of recommendation.

There’s another reason Krishnan would be inclined to run from such an approach: resentment. Not of Karl’s rather inconsiderate assumptions that he would automatically be willing to help someone he’s just met, but of Karl’s attempt to cut into a line in which Krishnan stood for quite some time.

That’s right: just as it is relatively safe to presume that the more recently a writer landed an agent, the more difficult and time-consuming the agent-finding process was – because, by everyone’s admission, it’s harder than it was ten or even five years ago to wow an agent – it is a fair bet that an agent who has been signed but has not yet sold a book will be lugging around quite a bit of residual resentment about the process, or even about his agent.

If an agented writer’s hauling a monumental chip on his shoulder about his agent seems a little strange to you, I can only conclude that your experience listening to those whose first or second books are currently being marketed by their agents is not vast. {and thus that you have probably not been hanging out after very many new authors’ readings}. Almost universally, a writer’s life gets harder, not easier, in the initial months after of being signed: practically any agent on earth will ask for manuscript revisions of even a manuscript she loves, in order to make it more marketable, and no one, but no one, on the writer’s end of the game is ever happy about the agent’s turn-around time.

{Truth compels me to add: except for me, actually. Among my agent’s many sterling qualities as a human being, he’s also an unusually fast reader, bless him.}

The point is, every second Krishnan’s agent spends reading new work is one second less devoted to reading Krishnan’s latest revision — or marketing it. Some authors are a might touchy about that, so tread carefully.

Even if Krishnan’s agent is a saint and habitually works at a speed that would make John Henry gasp, Karl was unwise to assume that Krishnan would be eager to speed up the agent-finding process for anyone else. For all Karl knows, Krishnan struggled for YEARS to land his agent – and, unhappily, human nature does not always wish to shorten the road for those who come after.

Just ask anyone who has been through a medical residency. Or a Ph.D. program.

Note, please, that all of the above applies EVEN IF Krishnan has time to read the manuscript in question. Which, as the vast majority of agented-but-not-published writers hold full-time jobs and have to struggle to carve out writing time – as, actually, do many of the published writers I know; not a lot of people make a living solely from writing novels – is NOT a foregone conclusion.

The best rule of thumb: establish an honest friendship before you ask for big favors.

Until you know an author well, keep your requests non-intrusive. Krishnan probably would not have minded at all if if Karl had simply asked for his agent’s name after half an hour of pleasant chat — heck, Krishnan would probably have offered the information unsolicited in that time — or even for permission to use his name in the first line of a query letter. As in: Since you so ably represent Krishnan Jones, I hope you will be interested in my novel…

It may well have turned out that Karl had a skill – computer repair, eagle-eyed proofreading, compassionate dog-walking – that Krishnan would be pleased to receive in exchange for feedback on Karl’s book. Krishnan might even have asked Karl to join his critique group, where such feedback would have been routine. But Karl will never know, because he jumped the gun, assuming that because Krishnan had an agent, the normal rules of favor-asking did not apply to him.

The same rule applies, by the way, to any acquaintance whose professional acumen you would like to tap unofficially. If I want to get medical information from my doctor about a condition that is plaguing a character in my novel, I expect to pay for her time. Nor, outside of a formal conference context, would I expect a professional editor to read my work, an agent to give me feedback on my pitch, or an editor to explain the current behind-the-scenes at Random House to me unless we either already had a close friendship or I was paying for their time, either monetarily or by exchange.

Tread lightly, and be very aware that you ARE asking a favor, and a big one, when you ask an author to help you reach his agent. Not only are you asking the author to invest time and energy in helping a relative stranger – you are also expecting him or her to put credibility on the line. And that, dear readers, is something that most authors – and most human beings – do not do very often for relative strangers.

Keep up the good work!

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Book marketing 101: tracking the wily agent in the wild

Yes, I am sticking my toe back into the blogging pool again today, but don’t worry: I’m dictating this immediately after an afternoon-long nap, whilst wrapped up to my nose in blankets, reclining on a couch, clutching a mug of herbal tea AND using a long-ago post as a crib. No low-tech effort has been spared, you see, to render this post as minimally energy-sapping as possible.

I’m anxious, you see, to get you out querying before the industry’s long winter’s snooze. This week marks the Frankfurt Book Fair, an annual literary extravaganza that leaves many high-powered agencies and publishing houses down a few bodies each fall, but from next week through Thanksgiving is prime querying time.

It’s a good time to send out a few additional queries even if you are already on the query-a-week plan — and especially if the best agent in the known universe has the full manuscript of your novel sitting on her desk even as I write this.

As my long-time readers are well aware, I’m of the keep-querying-until-the ink-is-actually-dry-on-the-contract school of thought. Think of keeping the query flow going as insurance: if, heaven forefend, something goes wrong with your top prospect, you will have possible alternates waiting in the wings. Or at the very least will be spared the effort of having to come up with a new prospect from scratch.

I’ve said it before, and I shall no doubt say it again: contrary to pervasive belief amongst aspiring writers, being sought-after by more than one agent is a GOOD thing — after all, nothing speeds up reading turn-around like the news that another agent has already made an offer.

I know it’s tempting to rest on your laurels while waiting to hear back on a partial or a full, but believe me, if — heaven forefend — the answer is no, you will be far, far, FAR happier if you have already begun to seek out pastures anew. The law of inertia tells us that a process already in motion tends to remain in motion; as anyone who has done serious time in the querying trenches can tell you, it takes quite a bit more energy to restart your querying engines again after they have gone cold than to keep plowing forward.

I know you’re tired of querying; it’s a whole lot of work. You have my sympathy, really. Now go out and send a couple of fresh queries this week. And next. Repeat until you’re picked up.

But to keep that flow going, you’re going to need to generate a hefty list of prospects. Today, as promised, I am going to talk about how to find agents to query — not just any agents, but the kind of agents who represent writing like yours.

And by writing like yours, I don’t mean books along vaguely similar lines — I’m talking about books in the same marketing category.

Didn’t I tell you that those exercises earlier in the Book Marketing 101 series would come in handy later on? Those of you who have been reading all the way through should already have a fairly clear idea of which categories come closest to your work — and if you do not, please see the BOOK CATEGORIES category at right.

Why is nailing down your marketing category so important? Because it is the language agents and editors use to describe books. Until you know in which category (or categories; many overlap) your baby falls, you will have great difficulty not only understanding agents express their professional preferences at conferences, but also deciphering their wants as stated in agency guides and on their websites.

I cannot overstress the importance of targeting only agents appropriate to your work, rather than taking a scattershot approach. I’ve written about why at some length in this series, so I shall not repeat myself, except to say that if you’ve ever heard a successful agent talk about the business for five consecutive minutes, chances are you’ve already heard four times that one of the biggest mistakes the average aspiring writer makes is to regard all agents as equally desirable, and thus equally smart to approach.

As a rule, they don’t like being treated as generic representatives of their line of work, rather than highly-focused professionals who deal in particular types of books. This is true, incidentally, even of those agents who list every type of book known to man in the agency guides. Go figure.

As I mentioned earlier in this Book Marketing 101 series, the single best thing you can do to increase your chances of acceptance is to write to a specific person — and for a specific reason, which you should state in the letter. Agents all have specialties; they expect writers to be aware of them.

Later in this series, I will go into why this isn’t a particularly fair expectation, but for now, suffice it to say that it’s expected. Within the industry, respecting the agents’ preferences in this respect marks the difference between the kind of writer that they take seriously and the vast majority that they don’t.

This is probably old news to most of you, right? If you’re taking the time to do research on the industry online, you have probably encountered this advice before, right? Although perhaps not its corollary: don’t approach agents — at conferences, via e-mail, or through queries — unless they have a PROVEN track record of representing your type of writing successfully.

This is for your protection, as much as to increase your probability of querying success. Think about it: do you really want to be your new agent’s FIRST client in a particular genre?

Of course not; it will be twice as hard to sell your book. You want an agent who already has connections with editors who buy your type of work on a daily basis.

Which brings me to the most logical first step for seeking out agents to query. If you attended a conference this year, now is the time to send letters to the agents to whom you were NOT able to pitch.

However, be smart about it: don’t bother to query those who client lists do not include books like yours.

I’m dead serious about this. No matter how much you may have liked the agent personally at the conference: the second easiest ground of rejection, after a “Dear Agent” salutation, is when the query is for a kind of book that the agent does not represent; like “Dear Agent,” an agency screener does not need to read more than a couple of lines of this type of query in order to plop it into the rejection pile.

Allow me to repeat: this is true, no matter how much you may have liked the agent when you met her, or how well you thought the two of you clicked, or that the second agent from the left on the panel bears a startling resemblance to your beloved long-ago junior high school French teacher. Deciding whom to represent is a business decision, not a sentimental one — and it will save you a tremendous amount of time and chagrin if you approach selecting your querying list on the same basis.

So do a little homework first. If you didn’t take good notes at the conference about who was looking for what kind of book (and didn’t keep in touch with the person sitting next to you, scribbling like a fiend), check out the standard agents’ guides, where such information abounds.

Then, when you find the right fits, go ahead and write the name of the conference on the outside of your query envelopes, and mention having heard the agent speak at the conference in the first line of your letter; at most agencies, this will automatically put your query into a different pile, because conference attendees are generally assumed to be more industry-savvy, and thus more likely to be querying with market-ready work, than other writers.

If you went to a big conference, this strategy might yield half a dozen more agents to query. Where do you go after that?

This is a serious question, one that I have argued long and hard should be addressed explicitly in seminars at writing conferences. Far too many aspiring writers abandon their querying quests too soon after their first conferences, assuming — wrongly — that once they have exhausted the array of attending agents, they have plumbed the depth and breadth of the industry.

This is simply not true. The agents who show up at any given conference are just that — the agents who happened to show up for that particular conference, people with individual tastes and professional preferences. If you didn’t strike lucky with that group, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you would have the same luck with another.

But obviously, conferences are expensive; few writers can afford to attend an unlimited number of them. So how else can you find out who is eager to represent what?

The common wisdom on the subject, according to most writing guides and classes, is that you should start with the agents of writers whose work you like, advice predicated on the often untrue assumption that all of us are so myopic that we will only read writers whose work resembles ours.

Me, I’m not so egocentric: I read books by a whole lot of living writers, most of whose styles are nothing at all like mine; if I want a style like my own, I read my own work.

However, especially if you write in a genre of NF, querying your favorite authors’ agents is not a bad idea. Certainly, the books already on your shelves are the easiest to check the acknowledgments page for thank-yous.

Actually, you should get into the habit of checking these pages anyway, if you are planning on a career in this business: one of the best conversation-starters you can possibly whip out is, “Oh, you worked on Author X’s work, didn’t you? I remember that she said wonderful things about you.”

Trust me, there is not an agent or editor in the business who will not be flattered by such a statement. You would be amazed at how few of the writers who approach them are even remotely familiar with the average agent’s track record. But who doesn’t like to be recognized and complimented on his work?

So, knowing this about human nature, make an educated guess: would an agent would be more or less likely to ask to see pages from a writer whose well-targeted query began, “Since you so ably represented Author X’s GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL, I believe you will be interested in my work…”

You bet your boots, baby.

So I hear some disgruntled murmuring out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you call out, “I already knew about querying agents I saw at conferences and checking acknowledgement pages. Aren’t there more creative ways to expand my query list?”

As a matter of fact, there are — but even as a dictator (dictatrix?), I have run out of steam for today. Hang in there, folks, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 12 Comments on Book marketing 101: a professional-looking title page, part II, or, lots of lovely, lovely white space

Book marketing 101: a professional-looking title page, part II, or, lots of lovely, lovely white space

Yesterday, I waxed long, if not precisely eloquent, about what a difference a professional-looking title page can make to a submission or contest entry. I hit this point pretty hard, because I know from experience as both a freelance editor and a contest judge that many, many talented aspiring writers simply assume that they don’t need a title page — a misconception that definitely costs them presentation points.

So where do these sterling souls tend to place the title page information, such as contact information and the book’s title? On page 1 of the text, where one might expect to find it in a short story submitted to a literary magazine.

Trust me, this is not where a professional reader is going to expect to find this information in a manuscript — and in many contests, including requested information such as genre and target audience on the first page of the text, rather than on a title page, can actually get an entry disqualified.

(To address the most common reason contest entrants misplace this information: don’t worry about the title page’s adding to your page count; it is not included in the page total. In every type of manuscript, pagination begins on the first page of TEXT, not on the title page.)

In a submission to an agency or publishing house, a professional reader will expect to see pieces of information on the title page: title, author’s name (or nom de plume), book category, word count (estimated), and contact information. If an author has an agent, the agent’s contact information will appear on the title page, but for your garden-variety submission, the contact info will be the writer’s.

As I mentioned yesterday, it really is to your advantage to arrange your contact information precisely where an agent or editor expects to find it. You want to make it as easy as humanly possible for them to say yes to you, right?

That being said, as in so many aspects of the publishing industry, there is actually more than one way to structure a title page. Two formats are equally acceptable from an unagented writer. (After you sign with an agent, trust me, your agent will tell you which one she prefers.)

I like to call Format #1 the Me First, because it renders it as easy as possible for an agent to contact you after falling in love with your work. It’s the less common of the two at agencies, and it’s a trifle spare, compared to most title pages. Lots and lots of blank page space, which is catnip to writers. We long to fill it. But resist that urge:

snapshot-of-me-first-title.tiff

For those who would like to have their very own copies, to see the formatting up close, here is a downloadable version. (Many thanks to clever reader Chris for suggesting this, and brilliant webmaster Brian for teaching me how.)

And here are the step-by-step directions. Standard format restrictions apply, so 1-inch margins, please, as well as 12-point type, and do use the same typeface as you used in your manuscript. However, unlike every other page of the text, the title page should neither have a slug line nor be numbered. As I mentioned above, it is not included in either the page or the word count.

In the upper left-hand corner, list:

Your name
Your address
Your phone number
Your e-mail address.

In the upper right-hand corner, list:

The book category (see how important it is to be up front about it? It’s the very top of the title page!)
Estimated word count.

Skip down 10 lines, then add, centered on the page:

Your title
(Skip a line)
By
(Skip a line)
Your name (or your nom de plume)

There should be NO other information on the title page in Format #1. Luxuriate in all of that lovely, lovely white space.

Why, you may be wondering, does the author’s name appear twice on the page? For two reasons: first, in case you are writing under a name other than your own, as many writers choose to do. It’s quite common for writers to use only their pseudonyms in submissions — which can cause some real confusion when a fictional person’s name appears on under the signature line on a contract.

Standard format eliminates any possible confusion by clearly delineating between the name the writer wishes to use on the title page (which appears, straightforwardly enough, under the title) and the one the writer would like to see on royalty checks (listed under the contact information).

(And no, for those of you who have been asking about it, Anne Mini is not a nom de plume, but the name on my birth certificate, believe it or not. My parents were so literarily-oriented that my father demanded to be led to a typewriter before they settled on a name, to see how each of the top contenders would look in print. The better to grace future dust jackets, my dear. And yes, there is a nonplused nurse out there somewhere who can swear that this is true.)

The second reason that the writer’s name appears twice on the title page is, as I mentioned above, to make it as easy as possible for the agent or editor to acquire the book. And that, in case you were wondering, is one reason that it is so very easy for the major US publishing houses to enforce their no-unsolicited-submissions-from-unagented-writers rule: the merest glance at the contact information will tell an editorial assistant instantly whether there is an agent involved.

Do not, under any circumstances, include a quote on the title page — and I wouldn’t recommend doing it on the first page of your manuscript, either. Many authors do this, because they have seen so many published authors use quotes at the openings of their books, to situate themselves amongst the pantheon of the published — and because, let’s face it, most of us read widely enough that we’ve collected a few pithy sayings along the way.

Trust me, the aptness of your quote selection isn’t going to wow the pros, for the very simple reason that 99.8% of them will just skip over it. They ask for submissions to read your writing, after all, not other people’s.

If you must use a quote at the opening of the book, center it on an unnumbered separate page that follows the title page. Or, better still, wait until after the book has been acquired by an editor, then have a heart-to-heart about it.

And remember, if you want to use a lyric from a song that is not yet in the public domain, it is generally the author’s responsibility to get permission to use it — and while for other writing, a quote of less than 50 consecutive words is considered fair use, ANY excerpt from an owned song usually requires specific permission, at least in North America. Contact the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) for assistance in making such requests.

Tomorrow, I shall go through the other title page style, which is my preferred method, the Ultra-Professional.

On a personal note, my posts will probably be shorter than usual in the weeks to come, and I may not be posting as often: I’ve recently found out that I have come down with mono, a rather nasty condition that apparently requires sleeping about twice as much as I usually do. The recovery time is rather lengthy — but I wasn’t about to abandon you all in mid-title page, was I?

So bear with me, please, if my responses are a bit slower than usual in the near future — and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: what do you mean, I need a synopsis, too?

Book marketing 101: what do you mean, I need a synopsis, too?

Did you notice yesterday that I began a subtle segue into synopses? Well, okay, not all that subtle — I just started saying that this or that piece of advice could also be applied productively to your synopsis. Which, in case you weren’t aware of it, you are going to need to market your book.

I do hope that wasn’t a terrible surprise to anyone.

Literally every writer in the world who deals with either an agent or an editor will need to produce a synopsis at some point — and since the first of those points is often immediately following a querying at a literary conference, I wanted to make sure to cover it before I ended the Book Marketing 101 series.

Actually, glancing back over my archives, I’m rather stunned at how long it’s been since I’ve devoted a post to ’em; like most unpleasant subjects, I guess we’ve all been gliding past this one with genteelly averted eyes. Since I haven’t talked about it in depth for a while, let’s start with the absolute basics.

For those of you new to the term, a synopsis is a brief exposition IN THE PRESENT TENSE of the entire plot of a novel or the whole argument of a book. Typically, professional synopses run from 3-5 pages (in standard format, and thus double-spaced, with 1-inch margins, in Times, Times New Roman, or Courier typefaces), depending upon the requirements of the requesting agent or editor.

Yes, Virginia, you read that correctly: agency guidelines and contest rules sometimes ask for much shorter synopses, 1 or 2 pages — and this is maddening, as it would obviously be INFINITELY easier on aspiring writers everywhere if we could simply produce a single submission packet for our work that would fly at any agency in the land.

As I have mentioned before, though, however much speakers at conferences, writing gurus, and agents themselves speak of the publishing industry as monolithic, it isn’t: individual agents, and thus individual agencies, like different things.

The result is — and I do hate to be the one to break this to you, Virginia — no single synopsis you write is going to please everybody in the industry.

Give each what she asks to see. Literally the only pressure for length standardization comes from writers, who pretty uniformly wish that there were a single formula for the darned thing, so they could write it once and never think about it again.

Why might an agency want a shorter one? Like so much else in the industry, time is the decisive factor: synopses are shorthand reference guides that enable overworked agency staffs (yes, Millicent really is overworked — and often not paid very much, to boot) to sort through submissions quickly. And obviously, a 1-page synopsis takes less time to read than a 5-page one.

As nearly as I can tell, the shorter synopses typically aren’t used for marketing outside the agency at all. Why not? Well, realistically, a 1- or 2-page synopsis is just a written pitch, not a genuine plot summary, and thus not all that useful for an agent to have on hand if an editor starts asking pesky follow-up questions like, “Okay, so what happens next?” (If you’ve never pitched your work verbally to an agent, and want to learn how to do it, please check out the PITCHING category at right. No matter how good a book is, learning to describe it in terms the entire industry will understand is a learned skill.)

Do I hear some confused murmuring out there? “Wait,” I hear some of you saying, “this makes it sound as though my novel synopsis is never going to see the light of day outside the agency. If I have to spend all of this time and effort perfecting a synopsis, why doesn’t the agent just forward it to editors who might be interested?”

Ah, that would be logical, wouldn’t it? But as with so many other flawed human institutions, logic does not necessarily dictate why things are done the way they are within the industry; much of the time, tradition does. So the argument against trying to sell a first novel on synopsis alone: fiction is just not sold that way, my dear.

Fiction is sold to publishing houses on the manuscript itself, not the summary. So for a novel, the synopsis is a marketing tool for landing an agent, rather than something that sticks with the book throughout the marketing process. (This is not true of nonfiction, where the synopsis is part of the book proposal.)

I’m not quite sure why agents aren’t more upfront at conferences about the synopsis being primarily an in-house document when they request it. Ditto with pretty much any other non-manuscript materials they request — indications of target market, author bio, etc.

Requiring this kind of information used to be purely the province of the non-fiction agent, who needed it to put together a book proposal. Increasingly over the last decade or so, however, fiction writers are being asked to provide this kind of information to save agents time. Since the tendency in recent years has been to transfer as much of the agents’ work to potential clients as possible, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if agents started asking for the full NF packet from novelists within the next few years.

But let’s not worry about that dread day until it happens, shall we? Today, in most cases, a 3 or 4 page synopsis is all a fiction writer will need.

But think about that for a moment: 4 pages in standard format is roughly 1000 words, enough space to give some fairly intense detail. By contrast, a jacket blurb is usually between 100 and 250 words, only enough to give a general impression or set up a premise.

I point this out, because far too many writers new to the biz submit jacket blurbs to agents, editors, and contests, rather than synopses: marketing puff pieces, rather than plot descriptions or argument outlines. This is a mistake. Publishing houses have marketing departments for producing advertising copy. In a synopsis from a heretofore-unpublished writer, what industry professionals want to see is not self-praise, or a claim that every left-handed teenage boy in North America will be drawn to this book (even it it’s true), but a summary of what the book is ABOUT.

In other words, like the query, the synopsis is a poor place to boast. Since the jacket blurb synopsis is so common, most agencies use it as — wait for it — an easy excuse to reject a submission unread.

Yes, it’s unfair to those new to the biz, but the industry logic runs thus: a writer who doesn’t know the difference between a blurb and a synopsis is probably also unfamiliar with other industry norms, such as standard format and turn-around times. Thus (they reason), it’s more efficient to throw that fish back, to wait until it grows, before they invest serious amounts of time in frying it.

With such good bait, they really don’t stay up nights worrying about the fish that got away. They know you’ll come swimming back.

I know: it’s awful to think of one’s own work being treated that way, or indeed, that of any dedicated writer. If I ran the universe, synopses would not be treated this way. Instead, each agency would present soon-to-query writers with a clear, concise how-to for its preferred synopsis style — and if a writer submitted a back jacket blurb, Millicent the agency screener would chuckle indulgently, hand-write a nice little note advising the writer to revise and resubmit, then tuck it into an envelope along with that clear, concise list.

Or, better yet, every agency in the biz would send a representative to a vast agenting conference, a sort of UN of author representation, where delegates would hammer out a set of universal standards for judging synopses, to take the guesswork out of it once and for all. Once codified, bands of laughing nymphs would distribute these helpful standards to every writer currently producing English prose, and bands of freelance editors would set up stalls in the foyers of libraries across the world, to assist aspiring writers in conforming to the new standards.

Unfortunately, as you may perhaps have noticed, I do not run the universe, so we writers have to deal with the prevailing lack of clear norms.

Because it’s so easy for a too-long or too-short synopsis to be dismissed, though, I would advise NEVER allowing your synopsis to run over 5 pages or under 2. Since 3-4 pages is industry standard, one that is much shorter will make you look as if your story is unable to sustain a longer exposition; if it is much longer, you will look as though you aren’t aware of the standard. Either way, the results can be fatal to your submission.

So what DOES work in a synopsis? It’s not going to sound sexy, I’m afraid, but here is the secret: for fiction, stick to the plot of the novel, include enough vivid detail to make the synopsis interesting to read, and make sure the writing is impeccable.

For nonfiction, begin with a single paragraph about (a) why there is a solid market already available for this book and (b) why your background/research/approach renders you the perfect person to fill that market niche. Then present the book’s argument in a straightforward manner, showing how each chapter will build upon the one before to prove your case as a whole. Give some indication of what evidence you will use to back up your points.

Well, so much for synopses. Tomorrow…

Just kidding; the synopsis is a tall order, and I’m going to walk you past its most common pitfalls. In a week or so, you’ll be teaching other writers how to do it — and you’ll have yet another formidable tool in your marketing kit.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 7 Comments on Book marketing 101: scanning your query letter for problems, or, the magnifying glass of love

Book marketing 101: scanning your query letter for problems, or, the magnifying glass of love

/snapshot-2007-08-31-20-56-07.tiff

I was prepping a box chock-full of copies of my novel to head out the post office — some agencies ask for one and bill the writer for photocopying after the book sells, others have the author do the copying herself, which is usually less expensive; my agency falls in the latter category — when it hit me that this was a book that I never had to query. I just told my agent about it, and we went from there.

Which made me wonder: had I mentioned here that while selling the first book project to an agent is notoriously difficult, as anyone who has submitted a book knows, but that subsequent projects are comparatively a piece of cake?

Translation: once you get really, really good at querying and reap the rewards by landing an agent, chances are that you’ll never have to do it again.

The Peter Principle in action, my friends: the system is set up to promote the most gifted queriers out of the querying realm. Oh, you will need to write synopses for future works, and you might be asked to pen some marketing material, but cold-querying, no.

While you are in the querying stage of your career, it’s is a good idea to have several out at a time, rather than only one. Since response times can be slow, sending out one and waiting for a response before mailing the next can cumulatively add months or even years to the querying process — from which it is your goal to graduate, right?

Seriously, ignore the astonishingly long-lived rumors circulating out there that claim that agents get miffed if you query more than one of them at once. Manhattan-based agents, bless their harried little hearts, tend to people who get impatient if the guy in front of them at the deli counter is taking an extra thirty seconds to decide whether he wants turkey on rye or roast beef on a bagel — waiting a month or two between marketing attempts would not really be their style, were they limping along in your moccasins.

Unless their agency literature specifically says that they will accept only exclusive queries and submissions, they EXPECT writers to be querying rafts of agents simultaneously. So don’t let the rumors to the contrary discourage you from querying widely.

This does not mean that I would advise sending out 50 queries simultaneously — it’s just too hard to keep track of that many. Also — and I hesitate to mention this, but it happens — this strategy substantially increases the likelihood of opening your mailbox to discover more than one rejection in a single day’s post, an eventuality that would knock even the most confident aspiring writer for a loop.

Call me zany, but I would like to see you get through this process with as few bootless cries of “Why me?” flung in the general direction of the heavens.

As I mentioned yesterday, it’s a great idea to have your list of agents ready, so you can send out a new one the very day a rejection comes in — or two, if the aforementioned mailbox contretemps should befall you, heaven forefend. That way, you can do something constructive in response to that silly form letter, rather than letting the negative feelings sink into your psyche long enough that you start to believe them yourself.

And remember: no matter how much an agent may insist that “there’s no market for this right now” or “there’s not enough money to be made with this book,” and no matter how prominent that agent may be, ultimately, a rejection is one person’s personal opinion. Accept it as such, and move on.

But before you do, make sure that your query does not contain any red flags that might be preventing your work from getting a fair reading.

This is not just a good idea strategically — it’s a good idea psychologically as well, if you’re in the biz for the long haul. Unfortunately, many writers automatically assume that it’s the idea of the book being rejected, rather than a bland querying letter or a confusing synopsis. Or, still more hurtful, that somehow the rejecting agents are magically seeing past the query to the book itself, decreeing from without having read it that the writing is not worth reading — and thus that the writer should not be writing.

This particular fear leaps like a lion onto many aspiring writers, dragging them off the path to future efforts: it is the first cousin that dangerous, self-hating myth that afflicts too many of us, leading to despair, the notion that if one is REALLY talented, the first draft, the first query, and the first book will automatically traject one to stardom.

It almost never works like that: writing is work, and part of that work is being persistent in submitting your writing.

Instead of listening to the growls of the self-doubt lion, consider the far more likely possibility that it is your marketing materials that are being used as an excuse to reject your queries. If you can ever manage to corner someone who has worked as an agency screener for more than a day, believe me, the FIRST thing she will tell you about the process is that she was given a list of red flags to use as rejection criteria for queries. And, oddly enough, many of these criteria are not about the book project at all, but the presentation of the submission packet.

The single most common culprit, believe it or not, is typos. (And no, that was not a typo.)

Read over your query letter, synopsis, and first chapter; better still, read them over AND have someone you trust read it over as well, checking for logical holes and grammatical problems. The best choice for this is another writer, ideally one who has successfully traversed the perils of the agent-finding ravine already. Writing groups are also tremendous resources for this kind of feedback, as are those nice people you met at a conference recently.

Remember, we’re all in this together, my friends; let’s help one another out.

But long-time readers, chant it with me now: avoid using your nearest and dearest as proofreaders, much less content readers. As much as you may love your mother, your spouse, and your best friend, they are, generally speaking not the best judges of your writing, unless they have won a Nobel Prize in Literature recently.

And often not even then. Look to them for support and encouragement, not for technical feedback. Find someone whose opinion you trust — what about one of those great writers you met at the last conference you attended? — and blandish her into giving your query letter and synopsis a solid reading.

Lest you think I am casting unwarranted aspersions upon your mother, your spouse, or your best friend, let me add that my own fabulous mother has spent the last fifty years editing the work of some pretty heavy-hitting writers; she is one of the best line editors I have ever seen, in my professional opinion, but as she is my mother, I would never dream of using her as my only, or indeed even my primary, feedback source.

Naturally, that doesn’t stop her from compulsively line editing while she reads my work, of course; seriously, when I visited her last week, I had not been in her apartment two minutes before she said, “Oh, I read that chapter you sent me. Let me just dig up my list of what you should change.”

In a family of writers and editors, this is an expression of love, believe it or not, and something that I do automatically as well. Years of professional editing causes a particular type of myopia that prevents one from ever reading again without brandishing a vicious pen that attacks margins with the intensity of a charging rhinoceros.

All that being said, I respect my work enough to want my first reader feedback to be from someone who has not been a fan of my writing since I wrote my first puppet play, ALEXANDRA MEETS DRACULA, in kindergarten.

(Alexandra wins, by the way.)

As always, make sure that you read everything in hard copy, not just on a computer screen; the average person reads material on a screen 70% faster than the same words on a page, so which method do you think provides better proofreading leverage?

Uh-huh. There’s a reason that my mother doesn’t want me to send her e-mailed attachments upon which to vent her love and editing pen.

Speaking of which, I’m going to sign off for today, to give my box o’ manuscripts the once-over before I seal the box. Even those of us trained from the cradle to spot typos occasionally miss them, and even though I did not query this novel, I want it to do well with editors.

If only to prompt them to say, “My, but that’s a clean, well-proofread manuscript. This author’s mother must love her very much.”

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Book marketing 101: there’s a reason that it’s called line editing

Book marketing 101: there’s a reason that it’s called line editing

Sorry about the skipped day of posting, everybody: yesterday just seemed to slip away from me somehow, probably because I was in the throes of Deep Thought. This summer has been an unusually intense one for me, teaching fewer classes, but editing more; doing less original writing, but selling one NF book and making the last tweaks on a novel to head out the door just after Labor Day. So it’s safe to say that I’ve spent the last few months buried up to my neck in the sand of publishing industry expectations.

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the most graceful image.

But it does give an accurate sense of how the prevailing norms both surround and constrain a writer. Or an editor, for that matter: a freelancer like me is at the double disadvantage of enforcing the prevailing rules without being able to reward good book with a publishing contract.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and I realized with a jolt that even though we are approaching the end of the Summer of Marketing (to be followed, I devoutly hope, by the Autumn of Craft), I have not yet written about one of the single most important truths a submitter needs to know about the industry. It is this:

Agents and editors do not read like other people.

Do I hear some guffawing out there? “Come on, Anne,” I hear the odd skeptic calling from the gallery, “give us a little credit for paying attention. Of course, they don’t read like other people, or at any rate don’t read submissions that way: while the rest of us read for pleasure, they read for business. Whether they pick up a book or not is not merely a matter of whether they LIKE it, but whether they think they can SELL it.”

My, but the skeptics are articulate today, aren’t they?

And smart: all of this is indeed true. However, there is another immense difference between the way professional readers and other book-lovers scan a manuscript. When your garden-variety reader picks up a book, she will generally read a few pages, a chapter, or even the entire book before making up her mind about it, right? Even if she doesn’t like one of the characters, or finds an aspect of the premise improbable, she will usually give the book a chance to change her mind.

Professional readers, on the other hand — and that includes not just editors like me, but agents, their screeners, and pretty much everyone in a position to say yea or nay on acquiring a manuscript for publication — read a manuscript line by line, especially at first. Then page by page.

And if something in one of those lines, or on one of those pages strikes them as off, they will stop.

Now, when an editor stops reading a manuscript she’s already acquired, it’s generally to write suggestions on the manuscript page; when an agent is perusing an already-signed client’s work, that tends to be the case, too.

But in a submission, it’s not the agent or editor’s goal to improve the manuscript: it’s to decide whether they want to take it on.

Which is precisely why the VAST majority of submissions are not read beyond the first page.

If this is news to you — in my bones, I felt a number of you clutching your hearts immediately after I typed that — I implore you to set aside a couple of hours before the next time you submit to read through the FIRST PAGES AGENTS DISLIKE category at right.

It may be a trifle depressing to see just how many ways a first page can garner rejection, but winnowing out the factors that tend to provoke a knee-jerk reaction in our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, will improve your submission’s chances of getting past her to the agent of your dreams markedly.

The fact is, agency screeners and editorial assistants are generally told to stop reading as soon as a red flag flutters its nasty little head.

Even if Millicent does not begin her career in submission-reading thinking this was a good plan, after she’s spent a few months, or even weeks, going through fifty submissions at a pop, she’s quickly going to realize that this policy is not about hating literature or making it as hard as possible to pass the Rubicon of landing an agent: it’s about time management.

Which means, as I have been saying for a couple of years now, that yes, presentation counts. It means that it is not only possible that some very small problem will knock a submission out of consideration, but that it is the norm.

Thus the difference in how they read and how we do: they are looking for a reason to stop reading; we are living in hope that the author will wow us.

I think it would save a great deal of chagrin if this simple dichotomy were more widely known. But the opposite seems to be true: the vast majority of aspiring writers believe, bless their optimistic hearts, that agents and editors will read with a kindly eye, one that can see errors in presentation and execution understandable in someone new to the biz to the talent that lies underneath.

You know, the way the members of a good critique group do, pointing out the problems, yes, but responding to the essential story and craft.

Most writers believe, in short, that when an agent asks to see the first chapter or the first 50 pages, someone at the agency will read the entire thing; if the agent asked to see the entire book, he will read it end to end in a single sitting. Then, and only then, will the agent decide whether to give the author a chance or not.

Believe me, my friends, if I ran the universe, the industry would work this way. Every submission would receive a full, thoughtful consideration before any decision was made. Armies of literature-loving cherubim would be employed around the clock to write encouraging, helpful analyses of each manuscript, to explain precisely why it did not, in the parlance of the industry, meet their needs at this time. Rejected submitters would be urged to work on specific craft issues, clearly explained in the feedback, and resubmit at a later date.

And flower gardens would spring up spontaneously amongst urban sprawl, every child in the world would have adequate health care and a good reading light installed over her wee bed, and dear little birds would come and perch on my finger while I drew water from the well to prepare the Seven Dwarves’ dinners.

As I believe I may have mentioned before, I do not run the universe.

99% of the time, rejected writers never find out just why Millicent bounced their manuscripts. But I’ll bet you a nickel that no matter what aroused her ire, she did not read even a sentence beyond it.

I mention all this not to depress you into a stupor, my friends, but to empower you: most of the time, a rejection is not based upon an entire manuscript, but a fraction of it. Which means, contrary to popular belief, that Millicent is not passing judgment on the entire book when she tucks that form letter into a SASE.

Logically, she can only have rejected only the fraction of it that she read. So does it make sense to revise the entire manuscript in the wake of such a rejection — or to go back, sit down, and figure out where she probably stopped reading?

Yup. That’s a LOT less work for you. When you start getting rejection letters that give substantive feedback, where the agent or editor has taken the time to explain why he is passing, THEN you can be sure that someone in the industry is basing his opinion upon a close reading of your entire work.

When that happens, you should be very pleased: it means that your manuscript is so clean, so free of logical leaps and narrative problems, so interesting that even a time-pressed professional reader, someone whose entire career has trained him to respond on a line level to writing, couldn’t find a reason to stop reading.

And that, my friends, is why detailed, personalized sorry-it’s-not-for-us letters are known in the biz as rave rejections. If the rejecter didn’t like the book quite a bit, he wouldn’t have read that far.

Allow these home truths to settle in the backs of your minds, awaiting the next time you receive a request for pages. Then, when you sit down with — long-time readers, chant it with me now — a hard copy of your manuscript and read it out loud, in order to catch any potential problems, you can try to read like a professional reader: when you encounter a problem, you will stop reading and fix it before moving on.

I actually will launch into my promised discussion of query letters tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: author bios, part II, or, chance favors the prepared mind

Book marketing 101: author bios, part II, or, chance favors the prepared mind

Yesterday, I was haranguing you about the vital importance of being an upbeat, can-do kind of writer, the sort who says, “Rewrite WAR AND PEACE by Saturday? No problem!” As the late great Billie Holiday so often sang, “The difficult/I’ll do right now./The impossible/will take a little while.”

(Will it vitiate my moral too much if I add that the name of the song was “Crazy, He Calls Me”?)

I was also, if memory serves, encouraging you to put together an author bio for yourself as soon as possible, against the day that you might need to produce one, immediately and apparently effortlessly, in response to a request from an agent or editor. I know, I know: we writers are expected to produce a LOT on spec; it would be nice, especially for a fiction writer, to be able to wait to write SOMETHING affiliated with one’s first book after an advance was already cooling its little green heels in one’s bank account.

Trust me, you’ll be asked to write more at that point; get this out of the way now. And if you’re a nonfiction writer, you’ll be writing the rest of the book at then, so you’ll be even happier to have one task already checked off the list.

Think of it as another tool added to your writer’s toolkit. Every time I have a tight deadline, I am deeply grateful that I have enough experience with the trade to be able crank out the requisite marketing materials with the speed of a high school junior BSing on her English Literature midterm. It’s definitely a learned skill, acquired through having produced a whole lot of promotional materials for my work (and my clients’, but SHHH about that) over the last decade. At this point, I can make it sound as if all of human history had been leading exclusively and inevitably to my acquiring the knowledge, background, and research materials for me to write the project in question.

The Code of Hammurabi, you will be pleased to know, was written partially with my book in mind.

A word to the wise: your author bio, like any other promotional material for a book, is a creative writing opportunity. Not an invitation to lie, of course, but a chance to show what a fine storyteller you are.

This is true in spades for NF book proposals, by the way, where the proposer is expected to use her writing skills to paint a picture of what does not yet exist, in order to call it into being. For those of you new to the game, book proposals — the good ones, anyway — are written as if the book being proposed were already written; synopses, even for novels, are written in the present tense. It is your time to depict the book you want to write as you envision it in your fondest dreams.

I mention all of this as inducement to you to write up as many of the promotional parts of your presentation package well in advance of when you are likely to be asked for them. This is a minority view among writers, I know, but I would not dream of walking into any writers’ conference situation (or even cocktail party) where I am at all likely to pitch my work without having polished copies of my author bio, synopsis, and a 5-page writing sample nestled securely in my shoulder bag, all ready to take advantage of any passing opportunity.

Hey, chance favors the prepared backpack. Once you’ve been asked to give an unexpected pitch at 3:30 in the morning to a bleary-eyed editor at an industry party, believe me, you never go near walk out the door unprepared. (The request, incidentally, was made by my agent, who is apparently always looking out for our joint interests, bless his book-mongering heart.)

Are you chomping at the bit to get at your own author bio yet? Good.

First of all, let’s define it: an author bio is an entertaining overview of the author’s background, an approximately 200-250 word description of your writing credentials, relevant experience, and educational attainments, designed to make you sound like a person whose work would be fascinating to read.

Go back and re-read that last bit, because it will prevent your making the single biggest mistake to which first time bio-writers fall prey. If your bio does not make you sound interesting, it is not a success. While you are going to want to hit many of the points you brainstormed earlier in this series (if you don’t have a list of your book’s selling points handy, please see the category at right that I have named, with startling originality, YOUR BOOK’S SELLING POINTS), you will also want to include some of your quirks and background oddities, especially if they are relevant to the book.

I can hear the wheels of your brains turning, reeling at the possibilities. While they do, let me get the nitty-gritty out of the way.

Use the third person, not the first. Start with whatever fact is most relevant to the book at hand, not with “The author was born…” Mention any past publications (in general terms), columns, lecturing experience, readings, as well as what you were doing for a living at the time that you wrote the book. Also toss in any and all educational background (relevant to the book’s subject matter or not), as well as any awards you may have won (ditto).

If your last book won the Pulitzer Prize, for instance, this is the place to mention it.

To put the length in easier-to-understand terms (and so I don’t get an avalanche of comments from readers worried that their bios are 15 words too long), I’m talking about is 2-3 paragraphs, a 1/3 — 1/2 page (single-spaced) or 2/3 — 1 full page (double-spaced). And, as longtime readers of this blog have probably already anticipated, it should be in 12-pt. type, Times, Times New Roman or Courier, with 1-inch margins.

Yes, you read that bit in the middle of the last paragraph correctly: unlike positively everything else you will ever produce for passing under an agent or editor’s beady eyes, it is sometimes acceptable to single-space an author bio. Generally speaking, though, bios are only single-spaced when the author bio page contains a photograph of the author.

I felt the photo-shy amongst you just seize up. Don’t worry; it’s optional at this stage, and I shall talk about this contingency tomorrow.

Got that length firmly in your mind? It should seem familiar to you — it’s the length of the standard biographical blurb on the inside back flap of a dust jacket. There’s a reason for that, of course: increasingly, the author, and not the publisher’s marketing department, is responsible for producing that blurb. So busy writers on a deadline tend to recycle their author bios as jacket blurbs.

Chance favors the prepared keyboard, apparently.

Before you launch into writing your own bio, slouch your way into a bookstore on your day off and start pulling books of the shelves in the area where you hope one day to see your book sitting. Many of my clients find this helpful, as it assists them in remembering that the author bio is, like a jacket blurb, a sales tool, not just a straightforward list of facts.

Don’t just look at books in general; be category-specific. If you write tragic romances, read a few dozen bio blurbs in tragic novels already on the market. If you write cyberpunk, see what those authors are saying about themselves, and so forth. Is there a pattern?

In good bios, there is: the tone of the author bio echoes the tone of the book. This is a clever move, as it helps the potential book buyer (and, in the author bio, the potential agent and/or editor) assess whether this is a writer in whose company she wants to spend hours of her life.

For two FABULOUS examples of such matching, check out ENSLAVED BY DUCKS and FOWL WEATHER author Bob Tarte’s bio, as well as FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) Jonathan Selwood’s. Both of these writers do an amazing job of not only giving a genuine taste of the (wildly different) senses of humor inherent to their books, but making themselves sound like no one else on the face of the earth.

And yet if you read them closely, apparently, the Code of Hammurabi itself was written as a precursor to their bringing their respective works to the reading world. Now that’s a great author bio.

Why? Because it’s a terrific way to establish a credible platform without hitting the reader over the head with one’s credentials. Sure, Bob Tarte could have just listed his animal-related background, but doesn’t this:

“Bob Tarte and his wife Linda live on the edge of a shoe-sucking swamp near the West Michigan village of Lowell…Bob and Linda currently serve the whims of parrots, ducks, geese, parakeets, rabbits, doves, cats, hens, and one turkey.”

make you more likely to pick up his books?

One of the reasons that I really like these two authors’ bios is that they have not — and this is unusual for an author bio — leaned on their formal credentials too heavily. In fact, I happen to know (my spies are everywhere, after all) that one of these gentlemen holds an MFA from a rather prestigious writing program, but you’d never know it from his bio.

And no, I’m not going to tell you which it is.

Why might he have left it off? Well, this is just a hunch on my part — my spies may be everywhere, but they’re not mind-readers, after all — but I would imagine it’s because he’s a savvy marketer: mentions of Ivy League MFAs generally conjure heavily introspective books of exquisitely-crafted literary short stories about tiny, tiny slices of life in the suburban world. (Such exquisite little gems are known in the biz as “MFA stories,” a term that is often spoken with a slight, Elvis-like curl of the lip. Since they tend not to sell very well, they have as many detractors in the industry as enthusiasts.)

In short, I would imagine that he left off that genuinely impressive credential so he wouldn’t send the wrong single about the book he is trying to sell NOW. Because an author bio is, ultimately, not a cold, impersonal Who’s Who blurb, designed merely to satisfy the reader’s curiosity, but a piece of marketing material. If it doesn’t help sell the book, it’s just book flap decoration.

Happy bio hunting, folks: ferret out some good ones. Tomorrow, I shall talk a bit about what makes a less-effective bio less effective, and then delve further into the mechanics of constructing your own. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 11 Comments on Book marketing 101: asking the right questions, some good news, and a goal!

Book marketing 101: asking the right questions, some good news, and a goal!

It’s going to be a long one today, campers, but I can’t resist opening with a bit of good news: I sold a book yesterday!

To be precise, my agent, the fabulous Jim McCarthy of DGLM (who will be attending a certain upcoming Conference That Shall Remain Nameless), successfully marketed my next nonfiction book, a political memoir I am writing with the godmother of the first civil rights act of the 21rst century, Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. It’s being acquired by a wonderful editor — and believe me, as an editor myself, my standard for wonderful is very high indeed — at a terrific independent press.

So I am THRILLED. Now I just have to write it.

Because, you see, like most NF and even most memoirs, it was sold on the basis of a proposal and the first chapter. And if that’s news to all of you memoir-writers out there, please see the WRITING MEMOIR category at right.

(Because I have a lot of material to cover today, I am going to refer to past posts, rather than explaining each point in full, as is my usual wont. If you don’t have time to check, don’t worry: I shall doubtless be revisiting many of these issues in the months to come.)

In case you’re curious about what happens after an offer is made and excepted, the agent then issues what’s called a deal memo, a 1- or 2-page document stating just the facts, ma’am: who is buying it, who the acquiring editor is, how much the advance is and how it will be paid (usually in either two or three installments; for further explanation, please see the ADVANCES category at right), the royalty rates, who owns what subsidiary rights (film, audio, book club, etc.), the area to be covered by the sale (first North American rights, first English-language rights, world rights), the length (always an issue in a book-to-be-written), the delivery date (that’s when I have to get them the finished manuscript), and the tentative publication date (when it will hit the shelves).

And all of that’s before the contract’s even written. Agents honestly do work very hard on their clients’ behalves, you know.

All very exciting, of course, and a trifle disorienting. I shall keep you posted, naturally, as the deal becomes codified.

A second bit of good news: FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) Jonathan Selwood’s first novel, The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse, comes out today, and with what fanfare! I was in Portland a couple of weeks ago, and just look at what greeted me when I arrived at my favorite bookstore:

/j-selwoods-marquee.tiff

If having one’s name emblazoned on a terrific bookstore’s marquee isn’t a goal worth having for any writer, I should like to know what is. Congratulations, Jonathan!

For those of you who live in the Portland area, Jonathan will be reading tomorrow night (thus the marquee) at Powell’s City of Books on Burnside. He will be reading in the Seattle area in a couple of weeks, and I, for one, am looking forward to hearing him.

So there you have it: concrete visions of goals-along-the-way for YOUR writing career. Go ahead, spend a few minutes envisioning your name on that marquee and your agent calling you about an offer on your book. That’s where you’re headed, and that’s why you’re investing all this hard work in making your work professional.

It may seem a trifle silly to say that outright, but it’s tempting to focus upon only the end products of writing: the book in the reader’s hand, the royalty check in the bank account, you reading your work to a hushed crowd of avid devotees. But days like this are well worth acknowledging. If you’re in it for the long haul, believe me, celebrating the victories along the way — your own AND others’ — helps sustain you through the long, dark days of seemingly endless work.

I mention this because it fits so beautifully into today’s topic: working up nerve to approach agents to pitch. Because, you see, in the flurry of pitching and querying, signing with an agent can start to feel like the end goal, the point at which all of the hard work is going to end, rather than a victory to be celebrated along the way. Yes, you do want an agent to fall in love with your writing — but never forget that the point of having an agent is to market your book.

Which means — and this is going to seem rather funny, in a pitching situation, when you are concerned with catching an agent’s wandering eye — you should be considering if the person in front of you is a good bet for helping you meet your ultimate goal of publication.

Because believe me, the author’s work does not end when the ink dries on the agency contract: its nature merely changes.

So you’re going to want to ask some questions about who these people are, what they typically represent, and how they like to work with writers. Agenting styles are very different: some are very hands-on, line-editing the work they represent, and some prefer to, as the saying goes, “leave the writing to the writers.” Some enjoy explaining the publishing process to their clients, and some are infuriated by it.

It really is in everyone’s best interests, therefore, that such preferences be aired up front.

I know: it’s intimidating, and you don’t want to offend anybody. But remember, these people come to a conference to discover people like YOU. Don’t talk yourself out of approaching them. Yes, the deck is stacked, but that does not mean that it’s impossible to make it: writers find agents at conferences all the time.

Including, incidentally, yours truly. After asking simply mountains of very pointed questions.

Fortunately, you need not wait until your pitching appointment or you have buttonholed an agent in the hallway to ask such questions: most conferences, including this coming weekend’s Conference That Shall Not Be Named, feature panels where agents and editors talk about their work. Almost universally, the moderator will ask for questions from the audience.

Here’s your chance to ask many agents at once about what they like in a book — and in a client.

It’s a golden opportunity — yet much of the time, it’s is squandered with the too-specific question of the conference newbie who thinks this is an invitation to pitch: “Would you be interested,” such a fellow will stand up and ask, “in a book about a starship captain who finds himself marooned on a deserted planet where only mistletoe grows, and his only chance of escape is to court the ancient Druidic gods?”

Now, personally, I would probably want to take a gander at that particular book, if only for giggles, but question time at an agents’ forum is NOT an appropriate venue for pitching. You should feel free to walk up to the panelists afterward to try out your hallway pitch, but you will make a much, much better impression if you use the question time for, um, questions.

What is likely to happen when our misguided friend ignores this dictum? One of two things, depending upon the mood and generosity level of the agents so approached. If they’re feeling kind, one of them will try to turn this too-specific question into an issue of more general concern, as in, “It’s interesting that you ask that, because the SF market right now is very much geared toward…”

The other, less charitable and more common response is for the agents all to say no and the moderator to ask for the next question from the audience.

Just don’t do it.

A popular variation on this faux pas is a questioner’s standing up, describing his book, and asking how much he could expect to receive as an advance. From the writer’s point of view, this certainly seems like a reasonable question, doesn’t it? Yet to industry-trained ears, it says very clearly that the asker has not gone to the trouble of learning much about how publishing actually works.

Why is that so evident? Well, in the first place, advances vary wildly. Think about the deal memo: pretty much everything that has to do with the author’s cut is a matter of negotiation. Which leads to the second point: a book that attracts competitive bidding today may not interest any editor at all six months from now.

So really, when an aspiring writer asks such a question, what an agent tends to hear is, “I want you to predict the market value of a book you know absolutely nothing about.”

Again: not the best idea. You’re going to want to keep your question general and, if at all possible, have everyone on the panel answer it, so you don’t appear to be targeting one of them for something he said. (It happens.)

Another common faux pas is to challenge what an agent on the panel has already said. Often, the writers who go this route will cite another source, for added credibility, “You said X ten minutes ago, but Miss Snark says…”

This question format will not help you win friends and influence people.

Why? Well, no one particularly likes to be contradicted in front of a roomful of people, right? Being told that someone out there is laying down rules of her conduct is far more likely to raise hackles than provide clarification.

And it’s not as though the average agent reads the many writing blogs out there, even if she happens to write one herself. (As does, I believe, Rachel Vater, also scheduled to attend the CTSRN) So any name you cite — up to and including Miss S’s, who enjoys a mixed reputation amongst agents — is unlikely to seem like an unimpeachable source.

Although you may certainly feel free to preface your remarks to my agent with, “I really like Anne Mini’s blog,” should you be so moved.

As long, that is, as you did not add immediately thereafter, “and she says that what you told us before is wrong.” Trust me: as an opening gambit, it just doesn’t work.

So what should you ask that intimidating row of agents? A few suggestions that designed to elicit information you would probably have a hard time gleaning anywhere else — and will generally provoke interesting comments, rather than the usual bleak diagnoses of how tough the market is right now:

“What was the last book each of you picked up at a conference? What made that book stand out from the others you heard pitched?” (I love this question, as it gives pitchers hints about how the agents like to hear a book described.)

“Who is your favorite client, and why?” (This is a question they tend to love, as it enables them to promote a client’s work. Make a great show of writing down names.)

“How long do you stick with a book you really love that’s not selling before you give up on it?” (In many ways, this is the single most important thing to know about an agent with whom you’re considering signing — and it’s an agent-friendly question, because they almost invariably answer it by talking about a pet project.)

“How is selling a first-time author’s book different from selling the work of someone more established?” (They’l like this question less, but it will give you a pretty good idea of who has sold a debut novel lately and who hasn’t.)

“Are you looking for a career-long relationship with a writer when you consider a submission, or are you only thinking about the book in front of you? If you thinking in the long term, how often do you expect your clients to produce new books?” (This last varies a LOT.)

“How much feedback to you give your clients before you submit their books? Do you usually ask for a revision before you send a book out? How much do you like to get involved in the revision process?” (Yes, this is an enormous question, but the agents who never edit at all will usually say so immediately.)

“Is there any kind of book you specifically do NOT want to hear pitched this weekend?” (Hey, someone’s got to pull the pin on that grenade. Sometimes they will answer this question unsolicited, however, so do keep an ear out during the forum.)

What’s the worst query letter you ever got, and why?” (This is a great question to ask if you’re not planning to do any hallway pitching. The responses are usually pretty colorful. It’s also worth asking if they have any automatic red flags for submissions.)

These are pretty fundamental questions, but you are well within your rights to ask them. Every agent has a different representation style, and you will want to know about any pet peeves or preferences before you stick your pages under their respective noses, right?

You’ll be pleased to hear, after all that, that there is really only one question that someone absolutely needs to ask at the editors’ forum — although most of the questions above will work in this context, too. Since most publishing houses now have policies forbidding their editors from picking up unagented work, everyone in the room will be happier in the long run if you just pull the pin on the grenade:

“If you found a fabulous book here at the conference, which of you could sign the author directly, and which of you would have to refer her to an agent?”

Yes, it’s a bit in-your-face, but the fact is, the editors from houses that have this policy tend to assume that pitchers are already aware of it. Asking to know whether you’ll be pitching to someone who could act directly or not can help you streamline your pitching attempts.

Don’t be afraid: you’re there to learn how to market your work better, and they are there to pick up new writers. You are not a second-class citizen begging the nobility for a favor, as so many first-time pitchers seem to think: you are trying to find the best collaborators for your writing career.

As Francis I of France put it: “The sun shines for me as for others. I should very much like to see the clause in Adam’s will that excludes me from a share of the world.”

You deserve to be heard, in short. Don’t let ’em intimidate you.

Tomorrow, a few hints on maintaining your energy throughout what can be a pretty exhausting event. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 5 Comments on Guest blogger Jonathan Selwood: Offbeat or Offensive?

Guest blogger Jonathan Selwood: Offbeat or Offensive?

Hello, campers —
Anne here, bringing you your promised treat for hanging on through Book Marketing 101: a guest post from the subversively hilarious author Jonathan Selwood. Since Jonathan’s first novel, The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse, is coming out from Harper Perennial next week, I’ve asked him to share his insights on how to market offbeat fiction.

He generously agreed — and the results surpassed even my high expectations. This is one seriously creative marketer.

If anyone is qualified to enlighten us on the subject of selling controversial writing, it’s Jonathan. Check out the blurb for his book:

For years, painter Isabel Raven has made an almost-living forging Impressionist masterpieces to decorate the McMansions of the not-quite-Sotheby’s-auction rich. But when she serendipitously hits on an idea that turns her into the It Girl of the L.A. art scene, her career takes off just as the rest of her life heads south. Her personal-chef boyfriend is having a wild sexual dalliance with the teenage self-styled Latina Britney Spears. If Isabel refuses to participate in an excruciatingly humiliating ad campaign, her sociopathic art dealer is threatening to gut her like an emu. And her reclusive physicist father has conclusively proven that the end of the world is just around the corner.

Now, with the Apocalypse looming — and with only a disaffected Dutch-Eskimo billionaire philanthropist and his dissolute thirteen-year-old adopted daughter to guide her — there’s barely enough time remaining for Isabel to reexamine her fragile delusional existence…and the delusional reality of her schizophrenic native city.

Now that, my friends, is a PITCH. Take it away, Jonathan!

/j-selwoods-cover.tiff

I don’t think I’m going to shock anyone if I say that it’s difficult to market an “offbeat” novel. The truth is it’s difficult to market any novel, and the less an author’s work fits into one of the currently hot genres, the more complicated the task becomes. So how does one best go about it? I have no #%$#&@% clue. What I do know is how I’ve tried to go about it.

As a first-time novelist with a dark comedy that at least one blogger described as “stumbling drunk through a fun house,” I began my marketing endeavors by looking online to see what some of the other less mainstream authors (read: mentally ill) like myself were doing.

I soon found that the answer was not much. Since the first thing I do when I hear about a new writer is start Googling, I was baffled to find that many of my favorite writers didn’t have websites or even MySpace pages. This seemed… insane.

I knew that if my little dark comedy was going to stand out in a tabloid world glutted with photos of pantyless starlets snorting cocaine, I’d have to do more than just send out a few reviewer copies and hope for the best. I also knew that the only way to get myself to put actual effort into marketing was to break out a fifth of Old Crow and try to have fun with it.

My first step was to design a webpage. Since I wanted the same kind of control over it that I have over my writing (I’m one of those sub-clinical OCD rewriters), I decided to learn HTML and design it myself.

Was this an efficient use of my time? No. In fact, it was a ridiculously stupid use of my time. I highly don’t recommend designing your own website unless you already know how to do it. In any case, at least I ended up with something that does not remotely resemble anybody else’s website.

When it came to writing my bio, I decided to forgo the usual banal listing of my MFA degree and utterly obscure publications, and instead compete directly with all those pantyless tabloid starlets by highlighting the nude cocaine parties of my own Hollywood youth. (Note: I’ve since discovered that if you Google “nude cocaine parties,” my bio comes up number one!)

I also had yet to garner any reviews (the novel was still in the editing phase), so I posted a bunch of embarrassing photos of my friends and just made up some reviews for a Readers Like You section. Why my friends allowed me to do this is beyond me…

Once I’d wasted so much time learning HTML, I decided I might as well design some more sites. Since the title of my novel is The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse, I quickly snapped up the domain and put up a bogus site purporting to scientifically explain said “Pinball Theory of Apocalypse.”

I think my favorite part is the description of what will happen when Pluto loses its stable orbit and collides with Uranus: “Once impacted, Uranus will quickly stretch out and expand into a superheated cloud of molten rock and toxic gas large enough to engulf the entire inner solar system.”

Since the protagonist of my novel becomes LA’s “It Girl Artist” by painting replicas of classic artwork with the faces changed to celebrities, I thought I’d also use the magic of Photoshop to put up some of her artwork in a gallery site. Macaulay Culkin as Blue Boy is my favorite, but I also like Tom and Katie as American Gothic.

It was at this point that too much coffee and perhaps too little lithium salt combined to send my marketing approach off into… well, a rather bizarre direction. In the novel, my protagonist is at one point pressured by her sociopathic art dealer to do an ad campaign for the hottest new craze in plastic surgery—vaginal rejuvenation. A deranged friend of mine here in Portland suggested that I actually create a joke brochure for vaginal rejuvenation.

The idea sounded so completely wrong, that I sat down and wrote the copy for it immediately. Another friend of mine in New York was kind enough to do the design work, and within a week, I had a lovely tri-fold brochure advertising everything from “Labial Microdermabrasion” to complete “Hymenoplasties.”

I then emailed a PDF of the brochure to my editor and asked if there was any way we could send out some of the brochures with the reviewer copies.

“Wait…You want me to send out a brochure for vaginal rejuvenation along with the reviewer copies of your novel?” she asked.

“Yes.”

There was a short pause.

“I love it.” She laughed.

(Did I mention that my editor rocks?)

In any case, Harper Perennial printed up the brochures and (still trying to justify all the time I spent learning HTML) I put up the Selwood Institute website.

Now you may be wondering whether sending out a vaginal rejuvenation brochure might perhaps backfire with some of the more humor-impaired reviewers. Well, the answer is, yes, it did—in fact, I’m still getting hate email.

However, The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse is a dark comedy, and anybody without a dark sense of humor is obviously going to hate it anyway. When you write something offbeat, you shouldn’t hope to please everyone—that’s what the mild-mannered mainstream is for.

Take a writer like Charles Bukowski (not that I’m making any direct comparison between my own work and his). The fact that so many people truly hate him only makes his fans that much more fanatical. When people came to protest his readings, he would blow them kisses.

The final move in my unconventional campaign was to set up a MySpace page —which is actually pretty damn conventional these days. Not only does it give me another place to try to hook readers with my bio, but it’s given me invaluable insight into just how disturbed my potential readership is.

In other words, I’m thinking about investing in some new deadbolts and a stun gun.

I should conclude by saying that my book has yet to be released, and I have no idea whether any of these techniques will work to boost sales. What I do know is that the next time I try to get a “straight” job, I’m totally #$#%$@. Seriously, who the hell is gonna hire the “nude cocaine party” guy?

Anne again: thank you, Jonathan! If that doesn’t get all of our marketing synapses firing, nothing will. In the midst of marketing season, it’s a timely reminder that knowing who your target audience is — and isn’t — is crucial to promoting a novel at every stage.

If Jonathan’s book piqued your interest, but you live in a part of the world that might frown upon your marching into the nearest bookstore and announcing, “Give me the book by that nude cocaine party guy!” here’s a good independent bookstore that just loves to ship things discreetly in plain wrappers.

Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: the pitch proper, part VII: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the… wait, why is that agent’s knee jerking like that?

Book marketing 101: the pitch proper, part VII: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the… wait, why is that agent’s knee jerking like that?

Yesterday, I tackled a reader’s question about pitching a novel that features multiple protagonists. Since I had a lot to say on the subject, I didn’t quite finish — but conveniently enough, the part I left for today dovetails nicely with a few other readers’ concerns about what should and shouldn’t make its way into the formal 2-minute pitch.

Last time, I went over a few reasons that it’s a better idea to pitch the overall story of a multiple perspective book, rather than try to replicate the various protagonists’ personal story arcs. Yes, it tends to be less confusing for the hearer this way, but there’s another very good reason not to overload the pitch with too much in-depth discussion of HOW the story is told, rather than what the story IS.

A writer has chosen the multiple POV narrative style because it fits the story she is telling, presumably, not the other way around, right? That’s the writer’s job, figuring out the most effective means of telling the tale. That doesn’t change the fact that in order for an agent to sell the book to an editor, or the editor to take the book to committee, he’s going to have to be able to summarize the story.

Writers very, very frequently forget this, but the writer is not the only one who is going to have to pitch any given book. If the story comes across as too complex to be able to boil down into terms that the agent or editor will be able to use to convince others that this book is great, your pitch may raise some red flags.

So it really does behoove you not to include every twist and turn of the storyline — or every point of view. If you really get stuck about how to tell the overarching story, you could conceivably pick one or two of the protagonists and present it as their story for pitching purposes.

“But Anne,” I hear some of you upright souls cry, “isn’t that misleading?”

Not really. Remember, the point of the pitch is NOT to distill the essence of the book: it is to get the agent or editor to ask to READ it. No one on the other side of the pitching table seriously expects to learn everything about a book in a 2-minute speech.

If they could, how much of a storyline could there possibly be? Why, in fact, would it take a whole book to tell it?

Believe me, this strategy is not going to come back and bite you later, at least not enough to fret over. After an agent or editor has heard a hundred pitches at a conference this weekend, and two hundred the weekend after that, he’s not going to say when he receives your submission, “Hey! This has 4 more characters than the author told me it did!”

I’ll get back to the desirability of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth a little later in this post, but for now, let’s move on to the next reader question.

Insightful long-term reader Janet asks: “What do you do when you realize that you might have to change the structure of the novel? Pitch the old way?”

I hear this question all the time during conference season, Janet, and the answer really goes back to the pervasive writerly belief I touched upon briefly above, the notion that an agent or editor is going to remember any given pitch in enough detail a month or two down the road to catch discrepancies between the pitch and the book.

Remember the concept of pitch fatigue? At a conference, the average agent or editor might be hearing as many as hundred pitches a day. Multiply that by the number of days of the conference — and multiply THAT by the number of conferences a particular agent or editor attends in a season. Not to mention the queries and submissions she sees on a daily basis.

I hate to bruise anyone’s ego, but now that you’ve done the math, how likely is it that she’s going to retain the specifics of, say, pitch #472?

The upside: you don’t really need to worry if your story changes between the time you pitch or query it and when you submit the manuscript pages. Writers rewrite and restructure their books all the time; it’s not considered particularly sinister.

That being said, your best bet in the case of a book in the throes of change is to tell the story that you feel is the most compelling. If you haven’t yet begun restructuring, it will probably be the old one, as it’s the one with which you are presumably most familiar, but if you can make a good yarn out of the changes you envision, it’s perfectly legitimate to pitch that instead. It really is up to you.

As long as the story is a grabber.

The final questions du jour, which the various askers have requested be presented anonymously, concern the ethics of not mentioning those aspects of the book one is afraid might negatively influence a pitch-hearer’s view of the book.

I refer, of course, to the book’s length and whether it is actually finished.

Let me take the second one first. There is a tacit expectation, occasionally seen in print in conference guides, that a writer will not market a novel until it is completed. This is most often heard as prevailing wisdom that you should have a full draft before you pitch, in case an agent or editor asks for the entire thing on the spot.

But as I have mentioned earlier in this series, that doesn’t happen all that often anymore. 99.9% of the time, even an agent who is extremely excited about a project will prefer that you mail it — and as those of you who have submitted before already know, it can often be months before an agent reads a requested manuscript.

Which means, in practical terms, that you need not send it right away — and that, potentially, means some time that could conceivably be used for writing. After all, if you’re going to mail it anyway…

And everyone in the industry is gone on vacation between the second week of August and after Labor Day…

And if you could really get away with sending requested materials anytime between now and Christmas…

And if they’ve asked for the first three chapters only…

Or, to put it in terms of querying: if the agencies are going to take a month to respond to my letter… and then ask for the first 50 pages…

Starting to get the picture? Naturally, I would never advise anyone to pitch a book that isn’t essentially done, but the fact is, it may well be months before the person sitting across the table from you in a pitch meeting asks to see the entire manuscript.

And you know what? You’re under no obligation to send it out instantly, even then.

Although I would not encourage any of you to join the 40% of writers who are asked to submit requested materials but never do, anyone who has ever written a novel can tell you that where writing is concerned, there is finished — as in when you’ve made it all the way through the story and typed the words THE END on the last page — and then there is done — as in when you stop tinkering with it.

Then there’s REALLY done, the point at which you have revised it so often that you have calculated the exact trajectory of the pen you will need to lob toward Manhattan to knock your agent in the head hard enough to get him to stop asking for additional changes.

And then there’s REALLY, REALLY done, when your editor has changed your title for the last time and has stopped lobbying for you to transform the liberal lesbian sister into a neo-conservative professional squash player who wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan in his spare time.

But frankly, from the point of view of the industry, no manuscript is truly finished until it is sitting on a shelf in Barnes & Noble. Until the cover is attached to the book, it is an inherently malleable thing.

The fact that everyone concerned is aware of this, I think, renders a bit of sophistry on the writer’s part over the question of whether a manuscript is completed somewhat pardonable.

This does NOT mean, however, that it is in your best interests to waltz into a pitch meeting and ANNOUNCE that the book isn’t finished yet — and because agents and editors are, as a group, perfectly aware that writers are prone to levels of tinkering that would make Dante’s inferno appear uncomplex, it’s actually not a question that gets asked much.

If you are asked? Sophistry, my dears, sophistry: “I’m not quite happy with it yet, but I’m very close.”

You are close to finishing it, aren’t you?

The question of length is a bit more tortured, as it tends to generate a stronger knee-jerk response in pitches and query letters than the question of time. At every writers’ conference I have ever attended, some stalwart soul stands up and asks how long a book is too long.

And then half the room gasps at the response.

I hesitate to give limits, for fear of triggering precisely the type of literalist angst I deplored a few days ago, but here are a few ballpark estimates. First novels tend to run in the 65,000 – 100,000 word range — or, to put it another way, roughly 250 – 400 pages. (That’s estimated word count, by the way, 250 x # of pages in Times New Roman, standard format.)

Standards do vary a bit by genre, though — check the recent offerings in yours to get a general sense.

And remember, these are general guidelines, not absolute prohibitions. Few agency screeners will toss out a book if it contains a page 401,

Do be aware, though, that after a book inches over the 125,000 word mark (500 pages, more or less), it does become substantially more expensive to bind and print. So if at all possible, you will want to stay under that benchmark.

And not just for marketing reasons, or at any rate not just to preclude the possibility of a knee-jerk response to a book’s length. If a manuscript is too long (or too short, but that is rarer since the advent of the computer), folks in the industry often have the same response as they do to a manuscript that’s not in standard format: they assume that the writer isn’t familiar with the prevailing norms.

And that, unfortunately, usually translates into the submission’s being taken less seriously.

Before any of you go running off madly to chop or extend your opus, do be aware that neither a pitcher nor a querier is under any actual obligation to state the length of the manuscript up front. I’m not recommending that you actually lie, of course — but if the question is not asked, it will not behoove you to offer the information.

Remember, part of the art of the pitch involves knowing when to shut your trap. You will not, after all, be hooked up to a lie detector throughout the course of your pitch.

(Although that would be an interesting intimidation strategy, one I have not yet seen tried on the conference circuit.)

Yes, I know, many experts will tell you that you MUST include word count in your query, but if your book is longer than expected, this is not advice that will help you, is it? Although many agents say they like to see it — for the simple reason that it makes it easier to weed out the longest and the shortest manuscripts — I’ve never yet seen a good query rejected simply because it didn’t include length information.

Whew! We covered a lot of ground today, didn’t we? Since you’ve all been so virtuous throughout this long and demanding master class on marketing, I have a great big treat for you tomorrow, my friends. Call it a reward for all of that effort over the past few weeks.

Speaking of which, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 11 Comments on Book marketing 101: literary and women’s fiction, part II

Book marketing 101: literary and women’s fiction, part II

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m gloating today — three regular blog readers have let me know that they have been named finalists in this year’s PNWA literary contest. All three in major categories, no less. Not all wanted to be congratulated here, so I am holding off on specifics, but really, I couldn’t be more tickled.

And if there are more of you out there with good news, please let me know! I love being able to report that hard work and talent are being recognized.

Back to work. Yesterday, I unearthed the spectre of books that might theoretically belong in one category, but might be placed for non-content reasons in another. Since (as I pointed out yesterday) female authors are often surprised find their work labeled as women’s fiction by their agents, I thought that I should revisit the issue again today to show that there might be very good marketing reasons for reclassification — and that in many instances, either category can be justified.

The marketing reasons are simple: as I mentioned yesterday, women’s fiction is the single best-selling category, year after year after year. Selling how well, you ask? Well, of the five best-selling novels of the 20th century, three of them would now most likely be marketed as women’s fiction — but if sales are any indication (and they are), these books are as mainstream as mainstream can get.

I’m going to show you the first fifty words (the limit of fair use) of each, to show you how thin the line between mainstream and women’s fiction can be. See if you can guess what they are from these openings, and who their target market would be. In ascending order of sales, here is the first:

Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it…

I’m assuming that you guessed at the first word that it was the best-selling novel in America for more than 20 years, GONE WITH THE WIND. But judging just from this opening, how would you categorize it? Women’s fiction? Mainstream? Romance?

See why agents and editors like to be told what the category is on the title page? It’s often hard to tell. On to the next:

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he…

Wild guesses? Hint: when they made it into a movie, the script transformed this first-person narrative from the point of view of a little girl into being primarily the story of her father.

It’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD; your high school English teacher probably told you it was literary fiction. But if you had to categorize this on those first 50 words alone, though, would you place it there? Or would it be women’s fiction, because it’s a coming-of-age story told by a girl? (And from these first few lines, who is the protagonist?)

Not so easy, is it? Okay, one more:

Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold…

Anyone? Would it help if I told you the critics nicknamed the author Pandora in blue jeans? Or that the mainstream press hailed this 1957 book’s success in as the end of literature?

It’s PEYTON PLACE — but if you did not know that, how would you categorize it for pitching and querying purposes?

My point, of course, is that book categories are not always cut-and-dried; ultimately, the book’s category is going to be a matter for discussion between you, your agent, and potentially your editor as well. (A MILLION LITTLE PIECES was, if memory serves, dubbed fiction by its author and agent; the publishing house, I’m told, made the decision to release it as a memoir.) So you’re not necessarily going to be stuck with your choice forever.

Be flexible — and choose the category that seems most likely to serve your book best at the agent-finding stage.

“But Anne,” I hear the literary-minded amongst you crying out, “what if my work genuinely IS literary fiction? Should I lie and say it’s something else, in order to make it seem more marketable in my pitch or query letter?”

Whoa, Sparky — no need to go that far that fast. Before you make any rash decisions, I would advise making absolutely sure that the book IS literary fiction.

While that may seem like a strange statement — after all, no one goes around challenging writers of mysteries to prove their chops — the fact is, the vast majority of books pitched or queried with a literary label are not. Without reading all of their work — which, as we saw above, is really the only way to categorize any book properly — it’s impossible to tell whether a book so pitched honestly is experimenting with new directions in style and construction (which is not a bad definition of literary fiction), or if its author merely want to convey that they believe their work is well-written.

The latter, as I mentioned yesterday, tends to fall upon the ears of agents and editors like the buzzing of housefly: persistent and attention-grabbing, yes, but ultimately not a pet you’re likely to bring home with you to cuddle.

But there’s something very sexy in the label literary fiction being applied to one’s own work, though, isn’t there? Let’s be honest about it: most of us like to think our writing has literary value, and critical opinion about what is High Literature changes with alarming frequency. It definitely sounds cool when you say at parties, “Oh, I write literary fiction,” as opposed to that stuff that sells in the millions.

Listen sometime to how people use the term at writers’ conferences; it’s almost a synonym for high-quality, especially amongst those who believe that most successful mainstream books are not very good. To these folks, the label says loud and clear that they haven’t sold out their talent; they are more than content to cultivate a small but devoted readership, without sullying their keyboards with all of that sordid commercial appeal. Quite the counter-culture roués, they are, with their goatees and bongos and poetry readings in basements.

Having been raised by parents who actually WERE beatnik artists, I feel eminently qualified to give a salient little piece of advice: be careful what you wish for your books. The literary fiction market is consistently very, very small, so small that many excellent published writers do not make a living at it.

Which brings me back to my point from yesterday: labeling your work as literary will NOT necessarily make it more marketable in the industry’s eyes, but less. Think very carefully about your desired target market before you label your work. If you really think it has broad appeal, label it as mainstream.

If I am hammering on this point with unusual vigor, because so many aspiring writers believe all really good fiction is literary. That’s just not true: there is excellent writing out there in every category. To set the needle on that broken record yet again: these are marketing categories, not value judgments, and mislabeling your work will most likely result in its ending up on the wrong desk — and you in the wrong pitch meeting.

So why don’t the pros simply listen to pitches and suggest alternative labeling, as I did above? Because, as I said, the only way to tell for sure whether a book is literary fiction is from the writing — and that would require investing far, far more time in a book than either hearing a pitch or reading a query letter.

Also, literary is the least-defined major category; I have yet to meet an agent or editor who can give me a definition of literary fiction less than a paragraph long. Like the Supreme Court’s famous definition of pornography, they can’t tell us precisely what it is, but apparently they know it when they see it.

Or so they claim. Ask any three agents whether THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, THE SHIPPING NEWS, and THE COLOR PURPLE are mainstream or literary, and you will probably get at least two different answers on each book.

How would I categorize these three? Well, none of these crossover books would be well enough known for all of us to have a discussion about them if they hadn’t been mainstream successes. So my instinct would be to label them all as mainstream, in retrospect. I don’t know if I would have been that wise, though, before they hit the big time.

If you find yourself in a serious quandary over whether your book is sufficiently literary to need to be marketed as literary fiction, apply one of two tests. First, take a good, hard look at your book: under what circumstances can you envision it being assigned in a college English class?

I’m completely serious about this. If the subject matter or plot is the primary factor, chances are the book is not literary; categorize it by content. If you can honestly picture an upper-division undergraduate seminar spending a few hours discussing your symbolism and word choices, it probably is, and should be labeled as such.

The other test — and I swear I am not suggesting this merely to be flippant; industry professionals use it — is to open your manuscript randomly at five different points and count the number of semicolons, colons, and dashes per page. Especially the semicolons. If there are more than a couple per page, chances are your work is geared for the literary market.

Or you should disable the colon/semicolon button on your keyboard.

Don’t believe me? Spend an hour in any reasonably well-stocked bookstore, wandering from section to section, pulling books off the shelf randomly, and applying the punctuation test. Seeing a lot of semicolons in novels that aren’t literary?

Almost certainly not — and here’s why: mainstream fiction assumes a roughly tenth-grade reading level; literary fiction assumes an audience educated enough to use a semicolon correctly, without having to look up the ground rules. If you are writing for most genre audiences (science fiction and fantasy being the major exceptions), most agents and editors prefer to see simpler sentence structure.

Do be careful, however, when applying this second test, because we writers LOVE fancy punctuation, don’t we? Oh, I know this is going to break some tender hearts out there, but if you want to write fiction professionally, you need to come to terms with an ugly fact: no one but writers particularly LIKE semicolons. If you are writing for a mainstream audience, you should consider minimizing their use; if you are writing most genre fiction, you should consider getting rid of them entirely.

Again, I don’t make the rules: I merely pass them along to you.

And yes, Virginia, I DO use a lot of fancy-pants punctuation here in this blog. I am writing for an audience composed entirely of writers, so I can use all of the punctuation I please. Heck, I can even use an emdash if I want to—take that, standard format!

Next time, I shall discuss the another building block to your pitch: identifying your target market. For those of you out there who thought that I was just going to cut to the chase and head right for the pitch proper: keep your shirts on. Or don’t, if you’re trying to get a suntan. But either way, be patient, because following me through all of these interim steps will ultimately help you construct a stronger pitch.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 3 Comments on The plague of passivity III: oh, what am I to DO?

The plague of passivity III: oh, what am I to DO?

Toward the end of my last post, I snuck in an aside about how writers often use passivity as a means of increasing their protagonists’ perceived likeability. Likeability tends to be a sore point amongst fiction writers, especially for those of us who write about female protagonists: when we include characters in our work whose political views are a bit challenging, for instance, or have sexual kinks beyond what the mainstream media currently considers normal, or even pursue their goals too straightforwardly, we are often told that our characters are not likeable enough.

Translation: according to New Yorkers, this chick might not play in Peoria.

Frankly, I think the industry tends to underestimate Peorians, but the fact remains, it actually isn’t all that unusual for an agent or editor to ask a writer to tone down a particular character’s quirks. Usually, these requests refer to secondary characters (as in, “Does Tony’s sister really have to be a lesbian?” or “Could the Nazi brother be just a little bit right-wing instead?”) or to specific scenes (“Need she tie Bob down?”).

Occasionally, though, the request is not quite so helpfully phrased: “I didn’t like the protagonist,” an editor will say. “If you fix her, maybe I’ll pick up the book.”

(Did I just hear some jaws hitting the floor? Yes, Virginia, it has become quite common for editors to ask for major revisions PRIOR to making an offer on a novel. Sometimes several rounds of revisions, even, so the writer is essentially performing rewrites on command for free. THAT’s how tight the fiction market is right now; ten years ago, most good agents would have laughed at such a request before a contract was signed.)

Much of the time, the author responds to such requests by making the character MORE passive — a bad move. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s a common writerly mistake to believe that a passive protagonist is automatically a likeable one.

It’s understandable, of course: Passive Paul’s a courteous fellow, typically, always eager to step aside and let somebody else take the lead. Almost all of his turmoil is in his head; he tends to be rather polite verbally, reserving his most pointed barbs for internal monologue.

Why, his boss/friend/wife/arch enemy can taunt him for half the book before he makes a peep — and then, it’s often indirect: he’ll vent at somebody else. His dog, maybe, or a passing motorist.

Romantically, Paul’s a very slow mover, too; he’s the grown-up version of that boy in your fifth-grade class who had a crush upon you that he had no language to express, so he yanked on your pigtails. He’s been known to yearn at the love of his life for two-thirds of a book without saying word one to her. Perhaps, his subconscious figures, she will spontaneously decide she likes me with no effort on my part — and astonishingly, half the time, his subconscious ends up being right about this!

Our Paul most emphatically did not cause the central problems of the plot — far from it. He’s usually the guy who tries to get everyone to calm down. Passive Paul has taken to heart Ben Franklin’s much-beloved maxim, “He in quarrels interpose/must often wipe a bloody nose.” He just doesn’t want to get INVOLVED, you know?

Oh, he SAYS he does, and certainly THINKS he does, but deep down, he’s a voyeur. All he really wants is for the bad things happening to him to be happening to somebody else four feet away. As a result, he watches conflict between other characters without intervening, as if they were on TV.

Yes, plenty of people feel that way in real life, especially Ordinary Joes who are unwittingly drawn into Conspiracies Beyond their Ken. We all have our moments of adolescent yearning when we long to have the entire universe rearrange itself around us, in order to get us what we want.

But as appealing and universal as that fantasy may be, it is very hard to turn into an exciting plot. What tends to end up on the page is a great deal of what we here on the West Coast call processing: lengthy examination of self, loved ones, and/or the situation in order to wring every last drop of psychological import from one’s life.

What does this look like on the page, you ask? Paul encounters a thorny problem. (Writers LOVE working through logical possibilities in their heads, so their protagonists seldom lack for mulling material.) So he dons his proverbial thinking cap…

…and two pages later, he’s still running through the possibilities, which are often very interesting. Interesting enough, in fact, that they would have made perfectly dandy scenes, had the author chosen to present them as live-action scenes that actually occurred. Instead, they are summarized in a few lines, told, rather than shown.

Did that set off warning bells for anyone but me?

Yes, there are plenty of good books where the protagonists sit around and think about things for chapters at a time. But before you start quoting 19th-century novelists who habitually had their leads agonize for a hundred pages or so before doing anything whatsoever, ask yourself this: how many novels of this ilk can you name that were published within the last five years? Written by first-time novelists?

Okay, how about ones NOT first published in the British Isles?

Come up with many? If you did, could you pass their agents’ names along to the rest of us with all possible speed?

Because, honestly, in the current very tight fiction market, there aren’t many North American agents who express this preference — and still fewer who act upon it in establishing their client lists. They see beautiful writing about inert characters more than you might think.

(Especially if they represent literary fiction; unfortunately, there seems to be a sizable and actively writing portion of the literary community who proceeds on the assumption that literary fiction SHOULDN’T be about anything in particular. But literary fiction refers to the writing style, not the plotline: Cormac McCarthy’s hyper-literary current hit THE ROAD is a reworking of a premise long familiar to any SF/Fantasy reader, after all.)

Protagonists who feel sorry for themselves are particularly prone to thought-ridden passivity: life happens to them, and they react to it. Oh, how lucidly they resent the forces that act upon them, while they wait around for those forces to strike back at them again! How redolent of feeling do the juices in which they are stewing become!

This is fine for a scene or two, but remember, professional readers measure their waiting time in lines of text, not pages.

To say that they bore easily is like saying that you might get a touch chilly if you visited the North Pole without a coat: true, yes, but something of an understatement, and one that might get you hurt if you relied upon it too literally.

“But wait!” I hear some of you shouting. “Now I’m so paranoid about Passive Paul and his lethargic brethren and sistern that I’m terrified that my book will be rejected every time my protagonist pauses for breath! I’m no longer sure what’s being nice and what’s being passive!”

Never fear, my friends. When you are in doubt about a scene, ask yourself the following series of questions about it, to reveal whether your protagonist is taking an active enough role in, well, his own life. If you can honestly answer yes to all of them, chances are good that you don’t have a passivity problem on your hands.

(1) Is it clear why these events are happening to my protagonist, rather than to someone else? (Hint: “Because the book’s ABOUT Paul!” is not an insufficient answer, professionally speaking.)

(2) Does the scene reveal significant aspects of my protagonist’s character that have not yet been seen in the book?

(3) Is there conflict on every page of this scene? If yes, is my protagonist causing some of the conflict?

(4) Does the conflict arise organically? In other words, does it seem to be a natural outcropping of a person with my protagonist’s passions, skills, and background walking into this particular situation?

(5) Does this scene change the protagonist’s situation with respect to the plot? Is either the plot or an important interrelationship between the characters somehow different after the scene than before it? If not, is this scene absolutely necessary?

(6) Is my protagonist doing or saying something to try to affect the outcome or change the relationships here? Is the protagonist integrally involved in that change, or merely an observer of it?

(7) If the scene contains dialogue, is my protagonist an active conversational partner? (Hint: if Paul’s linguistic contributions consist of “What?” “What do you mean?” “How is that possible?” and/or “Really?” you should consider tossing out his lines and writing him some new ones.)

(8) If my protagonist is not saying much (or anything), does he care about what’s going on? If he doesn’t feel that the situation warrants intervention yet, are the stakes high enough for the reader to worry about the outcome of this conflict? If not, is this scene necessary to keep?

#8 may seem like a harsh assessment, but make no mistake about it, to the eye of someone who reads hundreds of submissions, a protagonist who observes conflict, rather than getting actively involved in it, seems as though he doesn’t care very much about what’s going on.

Or, to translate this into the language of the industry: if the protagonist isn’t passionate about what’s going on here, why should the reader be?

To be fair, this assumption may not have as much to do with your manuscript as with the last fifty manuscripts the screener read, half of which opened with slice-of-life vignettes that demonstrated conclusively that the protagonist was a really nice person who did everything she could to avoid conflict. After a couple of dozen of these, a rude and pushy Paul can start to seem rather refreshing.

Yes, these are a lot of questions to ask yourself about every questionable scene in the book — but kindly notice that I have considerately dumped this truckload of queries upon you immediately prior to a long holiday weekend, at least in the U.S. And if you don’t plan to implement them right away, there are always those sleepless summer nights ahead.

It’s a great alternative to counting sheep, after all: Passive Paul would never consider using his pondering time to such useful effect.

Keep up the good work!

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What was that again?

For the past week or so, I have been talking about ways to self-edit your work in order to pick up the pace. In pursuit of that estimable goal, I went on a tear yesterday about redundancy, particularly word and phrase repetition. Today, I shall shift gears a little, to focus on concept repetition.

I dealt with this obliquely a few days ago, in my posts on eliciting telling little details. Again and again in manuscripts, I see good narratives sidetracked by a compulsion to explain what has just occurred, as though the author did not believe that the specifics of an incident, exchange, or character revelation could possibly have conveyed his intention for the scene.

Or, less common but still worth mentioning, summarizing what is about to happen BEFORE the scene occurs, as in, “I had no way of knowing that the events of the next day would shatter my childish innocence forever.” Personally, as a reader, I like to be surprised when childish innocence is shattered — don’t warn me in advance.

At base, both of these kinds of summary are based in an authorial lack of trust in the reader, I think: to a professional reader’s eye, they demonstrate that the writer is having a hard time believing that his target reader can follow the prevailing logic.

Thus, he explains what is going on, just to be sure. As in:

Shuddering, Hermione turned her back upon the human sacrifice. It offended her sensibilities as a civilized person. Where she came from, people seeking celestial intervention merely scolded God in private for not helping them more swiftly.

I may be leaping to unwarranted conclusions here, but I would assume that the number of potential readers whose sensibilities would NOT be offended by the sight of a human sacrifice is small enough that a contemporary writer might safely regard their critique as negligible. Personally, I am apt to assume that my readers are not given to sacrificing human, goat, or anything else that wiggles, so I would trim this passage accordingly:

Shuddering, Hermione turned her back upon the human sacrifice. Where she came from, people seeking celestial intervention merely scolded God in private for not helping them more swiftly.

Has the passage genuinely lost meaning through this edit? I think not — but it has lost a line of text, and believe me, when your agent calls you up and tells you, “The editor says she’ll take the book if you can make it 5,000 words shorter!” you’ll be grateful for every single expendable line.

Sometimes, the author’s mistrust of the reader’s level of comprehension is so severe that he go so far as to recap a particular set of facts’ importance as if the paragraph in question were in the synopsis, rather than in the text. For example:

“I canb he-ah you vewy wew,” Doris said, wiping her nose for the tenth time. She was prone to allergies that stuffed up her nose and rendered her vision blurry; moving here with her husband, Tad, her two adorable children, Newt (6) and Stephanie (8), and their pet ocelot Rex into a house in the middle of a field of mustard flowers, then, had probably been a poor idea.

Such a paragraph might work very well in a synopsis, serving as an agent or editor’s first introduction to Doris and her family, but in a manuscript, it reads awkwardly. (Try reading it out loud.) Since so much information is crammed into so few lines, it does not flow very well, so this passage would be a poor choice for the opening of a novel, or even the beginning lines of a chapter.

Yet if it appeared later in the text, wouldn’t the reader already know that Doris was married, had two children and an ocelot, and had moved recently? Wouldn’t this information be redundant, in fact? Besides, as any comedian can tell you, nothing kills a good joke so quickly as too much explanation.

Such global statements pop up in mid-text more often than you might think in submissions, though. There’s a reason you wouldn’t think it, if you read a fair amount: editors at publishing houses tend to leap upon this particular species of redundancy with all the vim of Rex pouncing upon a nice piece of red meat; as a result, one doesn’t see it much in published books. All the more reason to excise similar passages from your submissions.

Look how much snappier poor Doris’ plight is with the background trimmed:

“I canb he-ah you vewy wew.” Doris wiped her nose for the tenth time, ruing the day she had bought a house in the middle of a field of mustard flowers. It doesn’t matter if the scenery is magnificent when your eyes are too blurry to discern either distant mountains or your own driveway.

Partially, I think, reiterative over-explanation turns up in manuscripts because our ears have been trained by movies and TV to EXPECT redundancy. Almost any important clue in a screenplay will be repeated at least once, and often more, just in case some poor slob in the audience missed it the first time.

There is a long theatrical tradition of this stripe of redundancy, I’m told: in ancient Greek drama, a chorus provided frequent recaps of what had happened so far in the play. My college classics professor opined that this handy service, a sort of 5th century BC Cliff Notes, made it easier for spectators to nip out to have compact affairs with temple dancers and their neighbors’ wives; they could always catch up on the plot when they returned.

It’s amazing what one retains from long-ago lectures, isn’t it? You should have heard what he thought those figures cavorting on the sides of vases were doing.

But readers have an important advantages over the audience of a play — or at least they did before TiVo and rewind-able videotapes: books are cleverly designed so you may turn pages forward OR backward. Thus, if a reader has forgotten a major fact already mentioned in the text, she can flip back and look for it, right?

The moral: trusting in your reader’s intelligence — or at any rate her ability to figure out where to find information revealed earlier, even if she cannot recall it in detail — is an important key to keeping your pacing tight. If your plot requires additional explanation here or there because you’ve moved too swiftly, believe me, an agent or editor will will be happy point it out to you.

More tips on weeding out insidious pace-slowers to come next week. In the meantime, try not to stress out too much about your income taxes, US-based readers; at least this year, they are not due on the anniversary President Lincoln’s assassination, as they usually are. Now THAT’s a decision that cries out for further explanation, isn’t it?

Keep up the good work!

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These foolish things… remind me of you…

Yesterday, while discussing ways to increase the tension of your submission pages, I brought up those gem-like tiny touches so beloved of editors everywhere, the telling little details that illuminate character and moment in an indirect manner. The frequency with which telling little details appear in a manuscript is — for me, at least — one of the primary factors in determining whether to keep reading.

Why? Well, more than almost any other device, they give the reader insight into the author’s worldview. A good writer sees the world around her with unique eyes, and — ideally, at least — powers of observation heightened to an extent that many non-writers would actually find painful. This requires pretty sensitive nervous tissue, as H.G. Wells pointed out: he liked to call writers Aeolian harps (that’s a fancy way of saying wind chime, in case you were wondering), responding to our perceptions of the world through our art and, he hoped, making it better in the process.

Wells is now best-known for his science fiction, of course, but in his lifetime, many of his most popular novels were about social interactions. His Mr. Britling Sees It Through, for instance, was considered at the time THE definitive work on the British home front during the First World War. My favorite of his social novels is The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, a comedy about marriage and the establishment of decent, affordable apartment buildings for young working women. (Okay, so his political beliefs were not hidden here.) If anyone wants to see sterling examples of what I was discussing yesterday, the distinction between polite dialogue that drags and polite dialogue that sings, this novel is a great place to do it — it contains masses of both.

You’d thought I was just digressing on a favorite author and had wandered off-topic, didn’t you? I confess, I’m a bit tired, with all the furor of the last week, but I’m not THAT tired.

The tiny little details that our sensitive nervous tissue lead us to notice — the way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea, as the song says — are a large part of what makes great writing seem almost miraculous to readers. Not everyone notices the worn-down heel of the left shoe of the man in his interview suit, after all, or the way the eyes of the president of the local charitable organization occasionally glaze with hatred while her mouth is loading the members with drippingly complimentary gushings.

Feeling special yet? You should: being aware of these telling little details is a gift, I tell you, and most writers don’t rely upon it heavily enough in constructing their narratives.

And to someone whose job it is to read manuscripts all day, every day, seeing that gift wasted can start to get pretty annoying. “Where are those delightfully unexpected little insights?” they think, running their fingertips impatiently down page 1. “Where is the evidence that this writer sees the world in a way that will change the way I see it myself?”

A tall order, yes, but — wait, do I hear some cries of distress out there? “Did you just say,” a strangled voice asks, “page ONE? As in my manuscript should produce evidence of my unique worldview and uncanny eye for telling little details THAT soon?”

Great question, strangled voice. The answer is yes, if you want to make absolutely certain that an agency screener will read PAST the first page. (If you doubt this, please take a gander at last November’s series on reasons that agents report for not reading past page 1. It’s a pretty sobering group of posts.)

Some of you may find the necessity for cajoling reading more than a few paragraphs from people who, after all, asked you to send a chapter or 50 pages or your entire book. If you’re a novelist, it can be especially galling: presumably, if your forté as a writer were brilliant single-page stories, you would be entering short-short competitions, not writing 400-page books, right?

Believe me, I’m sympathetic to this view — if I ran the universe, agents and editors would be granted an entire extra day per week, so they could read at least 10 pages into every submission they request. Writers would get an extra day, too, and lots of paid vacation time, so we could polish our work to our entire satisfaction before we sent it out. And the Easter Bunny would live in my back yard for all of April, instead of just tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, I believe I have mentioned before, I do not run the universe. If we writers want to be successful, it behooves us to recognize that submissions are often read very, very quickly, and adapt our first few pages to that reality.

Sorry to be the one to tell you that. But before you condemn the rigors of the industry too vigorously, take a moment to consider the conditions that might lead to someone at an agency or publishing house to conclude that it would be desirable, or even necessary, to give a requested manuscript only a page to establish the author’s brilliance.

Those of you who were reading this blog last fall probably remember that old writers’ nemesis, the unpaid (or poorly-paid) agency screener. (She’s been with us long enough that I think she should have a name, don’t you? How about Millicent?) If you will recall, Millicent is the world’s most impatient reader, the one to whom you pray your manuscript will not be assigned: while some screeners and agents are looking to be wowed, Millicent is in a rush to get out the door; she’s put off her lunch date three times already this week, because she had to work through lunch, and she’s not going to miss it again.

It is now 12:10, she’s just noticed a run in her tights, and your manuscript is the next in the pile. How easy do you think it is going to be for it to impress her into reading past page 1?

I bring up Millicent not to scare you, or even to say this kind of reading situation is the norm for submissions — but since a writer has absolutely no control over the mood of the person deciding whether to accept or reject his manuscript, it is worth preparing your submission so that it would impress EVEN Millicent at her most frustrated. That’s just good submission strategy.

Actually, I have a quite a bit of sympathy for the Millicents of the agenting world, as well as Monroe, the editorial assistant who is her equivalent in publishing houses. They are expected to read reams and reams of paper very, very fast — and for this Herculean effort, they are not necessarily always paid. Often, this work is assigned to interns. If it’s the summertime, Millicent is probably on break from a good Northeastern college, someplace like Barnard, and since her parents can afford to support her while she takes an unpaid but résumé-building job, she’s probably from an upper-middle class background.

If it’s the rest of the year, or she has already graduated, she is probably paid — poorly — and lives in an apartment the size of a postage stamp with four other girls with similar jobs. Millie would not have gone into this line of work had she not liked reading — in fact, she may have writing aspirations herself, or she may want to become an agent or editor, so taking a job screening queries and submissions seemed like dandy on-the-job training at the time.

But now, after weeks on end of seeing hundreds upon hundreds of rather similar storylines, her capacity for appreciating literature has markedly dimmed. Sometimes, when she is especially cranky, a single line of awkward dialogue or two lines free of conflict can make her feel downright oppressed.

And your manuscript will have to get past Millie, and often also a senior assistant who has been screening manuscripts for even longer and has an even shorter boredom fuse, before it lands on the agent’s desk.

It had better not bore her. Especially if, as occasionally happens, your manuscript is the next on her list to read immediately after she has broken up with her loutish boyfriend, she twisted her ankle clambering up from the subway, or she’s wondering how she’s going to pay the rent. And if poor Millie has just burned her lip on her non-fat double-shot tall latte… well, let’s just say that the first few pages of your manuscript had best be tight.

And feature at least a few delightful little details that will make Millicent sit up, forgetting her bright magenta lip, and cry, “Eureka! This writer showed me something I’ve never seen before, presented in magnificent, clear prose! Forget my lunch date — I have something to READ!”

The miracle of talent, as Mme. de Staël tells us, is the ability to knock the reader out of his own egoism. Let your first pages be living proof of that.

I think you have it in you; that gift of insight is what made you want to write in the first place, isn’t it? Don’t let the difficulties of the submission process dim that mission. Millicent, and readers everywhere, will be the better for the originality of your insight.

Keep up the good work!

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Making it easy to help you, part VI: the other side of the etiquette equation, and a final exam

So, after all of this discussion about the ins and out of industry etiquette, what have we learned, other than to tread lightly and carry a stack of thank-you notes? That when one is entering a foreign culture with different customs — which, for most of us who aspire to publication, the publishing industry definitely is — it’s important not to assume that you know what is expected of you.

When in doubt, ask, and ask politely.

That being said, though, I think the reverse expectation — that writers will not only take the time to learn the norms of industry-acceptable behavior, but also that they will KNOW that they should learn them — is a tad unreasonable. Which naturally begs the question: why should it be left to articles at the front of agents’ guides, conference speakers, and writers on writing like me to explain what their expectations are? Wouldn’t it be easier on everybody in the long run if, say, the ten biggest agencies all agreed to post a list of expected behaviors for queriers?

Actually, some agencies do, but you sometimes need to look hard for it — which, again, presupposes that any given writer will know to look for it in the first place. The agency that represents me, for instance, has posted an excellent little essay on what a querying writer should do and should expect, but one has to pull up their submission guidelines to find it.

Just because some of the quirks of industry etiquette are a bit counter-intuitive, though, doesn’t mean that the standards themselves are arbitrary. Many of the expectations are deliberately distancing, a necessity born of having literally millions of aspiring writers simultaneously trying to flag down the pros’ attention.

Now, as my long-time readers already know, generally speaking, I don’t have tremendous sympathy for the vicissitudes to which agents and editors are subjected in the course of plying their craft. At this point in publishing history, for instance, surely everyone going into the agenting line is aware going in that he’s going to have to read thousands upon thousands of queries per year, and that many of them are going to sound very similar.

Ditto with encountering manuscripts that are not in standard format: since deviations bug them so much, I see no reason why EVERY agency should not have a page of its website devoted to the specifics of submission standards. (Ah, I can always dream, can’t I?)

But on the subject of the sometimes extremely fine line between being nice and being taken advantage of, I think that agents and editors often do have legitimate cause for resentment. As do established writers, writing teachers, and so forth. Because, really, it is a little hard when one can’t simply practice the politeness one’s mother drummed into one without giving the impression that one intends to make promoting the work of the total stranger in front of one one’s life’s mission.

(And that, by the way, is why no one but writers and professors at British universities like the continual formal use of one in sentences. Couldn’t resist tossing in that little editing tip, although I constantly violate it myself. Do as I say, not as I do, as the father of the 6-year-old said while juggling flaming bowling balls while riding upon a snarling tiger’s back.)

True, it wouldn’t kill most of these people to be nicer to aspiring writers, but pretty much everyone in the industry has at least a second-hand story about a small act of kindness that went terribly awry. Most of us — and yes, I include myself here, as I get masses of requests for unpaid help — have had negative first-hand experiences.

Doubt this? Get a couple of drinks into any group of presenters at a major conference, and out will pour stories about how people they barely knew blandly expected mountains to be moved on their behalf — and, when said mountains were moved, were not even grateful.

“Ungrateful?” I hear some of you gasp. “I would give three of my toes for a genuine publishing opportunity! How dare they assume that I would be ungrateful, just because others were?”

Well, perhaps it is unfair, but they do it for precisely the reasons we’ve seen cropping up in many of this series’ examples: because granting one favor so often raises the expectation of further favors; because favors that require effort on the helper’s part are received without gratitude; because sometimes, the person we choose to help acts badly, making us look bad. Remember, it only takes one ungrateful, pushy person, or even one a well-meaning person conveying an avalanche of expectation, to provide a substantial disincentive to future kindness.

To demonstrate why, and to round out this series, I’m going to subject you to two more examples — but this time, I will tell the stories from the point of view of the imposed-upon, rather than the imposer. Keep a weather eye on the aspiring writers’ intentions here: from the other side, were they clear and honest, or did the pro have good reason to back off?

Flipped perspective scenario 1: Ursula has been working the conference and intensive seminar circuit to the advantage of her career for quite some time now. She has learned a great deal, gotten agents’ and editors’ feedback on her writing and incorporated it judiciously, and has made friends with a number of good writers, aspiring and otherwise.

One of these conference friends, Vickie (I give up on trying to come up with another U name), enjoys an excellent relationship with her agent, William. Since Vickie and Ursula write for the same market, Vickie has historically been glad to give Ursula marketing advice every now and again.

A few years into their friendship, Ursula sends Vickie an e-mail: does Vickie think that William would be a good fit for the book Ursula had just completed?

Since Vickie has been around the block a few times, she can read the subtext here: Ursula is gearing up to ask for a referral. Although she had not read any of the book in question, she had read some of Ursula’s first book; she knows that Ursula can write. From what Ursula had said about the book, William might be interested.

So, after giving the matter a little thought, Vickie says, “Yes, I think you should query him — and, if you like, you may say I sent you.”

Feeling a warm glow from having done a good turn for a deserving writer, Vickie goes back to work, assuming that Ursula is more than capable of following through on her own. A few weeks later, Ursula e-mails another request, however: now that she has sent off the query, would Vickie mind putting in a good word with William directly, to confirm the recommendation?

Well, this is unusual, but Vickie’s a good soul, and she honestly does want to see Ursula succeed. Contacting William about a writer he’s never met is putting herself on the line more than she intended, a significantly stronger recommendation, but again, she thinks about it, and decides she’s willing to do it. After writing William a glowing e-mail about what a pro Ursula is, and how much she deserves a break, she once again goes back to work.

The next day, she receives another e-mail from Ursula: had she put in the good word yet? A little surprised, Vickie writes back that she has — and once again goes back to work on her novel.

Upon turning on her computer the following morning, Vickie notices with some trepidation that there’s yet another e-mail from Ursula.

This one is overjoyed: on the strength of Vickie’s recommendation, Ursula decided to e-mail William directly, as a follow-up to her query letter. And William had graciously e-mailed back right away, requesting the manuscript!

Although she is thrilled for Ursula, something about this exchange nags at Vickie. Why did Ursula e-mail William at all, when she had already mailed a query? Isn’t she afraid of bugging him? But she shrugs it off, congratulates Ursula, and goes back to work.

The next day, Vickie receives another e-mail from Ursula, this time angry. “All I did was call William to tell him I wouldn’t be able to send my manuscript for a few days — I want to revise it a bit more first — and boy, was he cold! Do you think he’s turned off the project?”

Vickie has been in the biz long enough to be able to picture William’s probable reaction to an unsolicited phone call from an aspiring writer. Now beginning to regret that she made the recommendation at all, she gently explains to Ursula that calling probably hadn’t been a good idea.

The next day, Ursula e-mails again; Vickie is beginning to dread turning on her computer. “It’s okay,” Ursula writes, “William’s not mad. After I got your e-mail, I called back and apologized.”

By now, Vickie wants to crawl into a hole. It had never occurred to her to make sure that Ursula was familiar with the rules of industry etiquette before recommending her; how is she ever going to be able to recommend anyone to William again? Now, instead of getting back to work on her next novel, she spends hours on end composing letters of apology to him, then tearing them up.

A week goes by: Ursula again. “Why haven’t I heard back from William?” she writes. “Can you give him a call and find out?”

Vickie does not reply.

The next day, the request is repeated, and the day after that. The e-mails begin to become angry: does Vickie want to help her or not?

And so it goes, day after day, week after week, until William rejects the manuscript: every second, it seems, Ursula is e-mailing her to ask a further favor — or letting her know that she has called or e-mailed William again herself, and what he said. Vickie feels positively haunted, and downright relieved when Ursula angrily sends a final e-mail: “I don’t know why you said he’d be interested. He obviously wasn’t.”

If you don’t know what Ursula did wrong here, I can only urge you to go back and re-read this series for tips on how NOT to interact with an agent or established writer. But wasn’t it interesting to see how stressful and humiliating this set of events was for Vickie? And, by extension, for William?

This, my friends, is why the industry clings to its rather old-fashioned etiquette — and why agents tend to be so quick to reject aspiring writers who bend its strictures just a little. Everyone in publishing knows someone like Vickie or William — or has BEEN someone like Vickie or William.

Realizing this fact is extremely valuable to writers new to the publishing world. Agents, editors, and established writers don’t keep aspiring writers at arm’s length just for the fun of it, and this attitude is most assuredly not personally aimed at any individual writer. They’re trying to protect themselves from imposition, because although 99,993 of the writers who approach any of them in any given year may be perfectly respectful, the other 7 were lulus, time-consuming and rude.

Your job, then, is to demonstrate from minute one that you’re not one of those 7.

Okay, I’m running quite long here, but I can’t resist finishing up the series and the alphabet with one more tale. This is your final exam: what did our exemplar do wrong, and at what point would you have pulled the plug had you been the pro?

Flipped perspective scenario 2: Xerxes is a writer ostensibly on the verge of making it big: his agent, Yarrow, parlayed those two novels that had been sitting in his bottom drawer through eight years of agent-searching into a three-book deal at a major house. Yet two years after that contract was signed, exhausted from an extensive round of readings and stressed from lower-than-expected sales on the first book, he struggles to complete the third, interrupting his work frequently to check his first’s current rank on Amazon.

At a family get-together, his godmother pulls him aside. She points out another guest, someone he’s never seen before, as Zebulon, an aspiring writer, someone she met at the gym. As a favor to her, would Xerxes mind giving him a few pointers on how to land an agent?

Admit it — you’re already cringing, aren’t you? Remember that feeling the next time you attend a book reading or conference — that’s precisely how established writers start to feel.

However much he may resent being approached through his nearest and dearest, Xerxes is aware that he needs to be careful about alienating potential book buyers. Besides, he is fond of his godmother. So he walks over and introduces himself to Zebulon.

Rather to his surprise, Zebulon turns out not to be a vampire intent upon sucking his advice wells dry, but a fairly charming person; even more surprising, it turns out he is quite a good writer, as he learns when he looks up Zebulon’s blog. In fact, Zebulon seems to have quite a following, writing exactly the type of story that brought Xerxes to national attention as a short story writer years before. So much so that Xerxes’ agent would be an almost miraculously perfect match for Zebulon’s work.

Again — note that twinge of compunction, for future reference.

Contrary to expectation, Zebulon does not ask Xerxes to introduce him to his agent, Yarrow; he does not even seem to understand why he needs an agent at all. Explaining makes Xerxes feel magnanimous, big — all the more so as Zebulon keeps saying how grateful he is for the information. Touchingly, Zebulon does not even seem to have any idea of what makes one agent a better fit than another.

Determined to save this babe in the woods from what he knows from long, hard personal experience can be an ego-destroying journey of years, Xerxes does something for Zebulon for which millions of aspiring writers would cheerfully kill: he picks up the phone and talks Yarrow into agreeing to have a 15-minute conversation with Zebulon, to allow his new friend to pitch his work over the phone. It’s not an easy sell.

Yet when Zebulon calls Xerxes after this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he seems disappointed. “Your agent wouldn’t even visit my blog,” he tells Xerxes, incensed. “She said she could not commit to anything until after she read my manuscript.”

“Yes?” Xerxes asks, waiting expectantly to learn why Zebulon is upset.

It was not until three months later, when Zebulon calls to say he was on his way over to Xerxes’ house with his now multiply-revised manuscript, begging aid for the fourth time this week, although Zebulon by his own admission had the flu and a fever of over 100 degrees, that it occurs to Xerxes that he might be being imposed upon.

Or, rather, to be more precise, the realization occurs while he is explaining to Zebulon that no matter how badly he wanted to get a book published, he should not give the flu to everyone he knew — especially now that Xerxes is right on top of his own book deadline.

“But I want to get this out the door by Monday,” Zebulon keeps protesting. “And you told your agent I was going to send it.”

Xerxes closes his bloodshot eyes, willing the entire situation to disappear. He had gone out on a limb with Yarrow on behalf of a writer he did not know particularly well at the time, so now Xerxes’ credibility is tied up with how professionally Zebulon meets his stated deadlines — as well as the quality of the manuscript, since he had insisted that Yarrow could not live another minute without reading this guy’s work. Essentially, by having promoted Zebulon so enthusiastically, he has condemned himself to be unpaid editor and writing coach, all with no conceivable future benefit to himself, other than the prospect of pleasing his godmother.

And that, my friends, why so many agented writers will automatically run the other way when approached by a perfectly polite writer with a request for a reference. Most of us have been burned at least once.

I wish I could say that this was an isolated incident, but honestly, I’ve heard versions of the same story from practically every established writer, writing teacher, and freelance editor that I know, and even a few agents as well. Once someone like Zebulon gets it into his head that someone like Xerxes can help him, all boundaries seem to vanish: the helper goes from feeling generous to feeling used.

How used? Well, enough for me to stray from my series-long commitment to presenting only composite cases to fill you in on what ultimately happened with my own personal Zebulon: my agent did sign him (or was it her?), and within a matter of a couple of weeks, Zebulon had virtually dropped out of my life. Turned out he (or was it she?) had known all along precisely who my agent was; now, after I got him what he wanted, I degenerated into just another unpaid social debt. A few short months later, when Zebulon’s first book sold, I found out from — you guessed it, my godmother.

Once something like that happens to you, you don’t forget it easily. So believe me when I say: if a sweet person like me is still mildly annoyed a year after an event like mine, the average agent is still livid over his.

So remember to be on your best behavior when walking into the publishing world: you have other writers’ faux pas to rise above. That’s a tough row to hoe, so keep up the good work, everybody.

Posted on - No Comments on More faux pas: making it easy to help you

More faux pas: making it easy to help you

My series on industry etiquette is beginning to wind to a close, and reading back over it, I realized that it does sound as though agents just sit around, waiting to be insulted by aspiring writers. That’s not really the case, actually: it’s just that the competition for their scant attention is so fierce that the costs of walking away from a gifted writer who is even just a bit rude are minimal.

I think agents everywhere should forgive us, however, if from the rejected writer’s point of view, though, the distinction between being very easily turned off, inordinately picky, and aching to be insulted sometimes look very similar indeed.

My hope in running through some of the major faux pas is to make sure that none of my readers inadvertently give them an excuse to don those walking boots. Since I’ve been concentrating so much lately on what you SHOULDN’T do, though, I wanted to devote some time today talking about what you SHOULD, to talk about how to be polite rather than how to avoid being impolite.

To that end, I am going to share an extremely important piece of writerly advice, one that I learned from established authors in my wayward infancy, even before I knew my way around a keyboard:

Make it as easy as humanly possible for folks in the industry to help you.

Seems kind of self-evident, doesn’t it, stated baldly like that? But honestly, aspiring writers don’t practice it enough.

Oh, most of us send the requisite SASEs with our work — a courtesy which, incidentally, is regarded by the industry as a convenience for the writer, not for the agent or editor, a way to assure that the manuscript in question did not just float into a black hole somewhere, never to be seen again. The theory that SASEs are an insidious means of forcing writers to pay postage on their own rejections is exclusive to writers’ minds.

However true it may be.

There are other little courtesies that make it easier for the agent to respond, of course. Back in my querying days, I would habitually enclose a business-size SASE in addition to the manuscript-sized one whenever an agent asked for a partial manuscript, to make it a snap to ask for the rest of the book.

These days, one is much more likely to hear back via e-mail, or even phone, so a great way to make it easy to say yes to you is to include your e-mail address and phone number prominently in your cover letter.

I would also — as intrepid and clever reader Janet mentioned doing in a comment a few weeks back — include a stamped, self-addressed postcard, to make it easy as pie for an agency to let me know that it had received my submission. To render the process a little more fun, I used to enliven mine with checkboxes: “Yes, the manuscript arrived in one piece on (date),” “No, the manuscript was mauled by the post office in transit; please send again,” and “Only this postcard arrived intact.”

No one ever checked anything but the first, of course, but at least I amused a screener or two, and I had physical evidence that my manuscript had indeed reached its desired destination. More to the point, I made it clear to the agency screeners that I was taking responsibility for getting my work to them promptly and in one piece — and demonstrated that if something went wrong in transit, I wanted to know about it so I could make it right.

I was, in short, showing that I would be easy to help once they signed me.

Similarly, when asking for feedback from a first reader, I like to include a set of questions I would like answered with the manuscript. That way, the first reader does not need to second-guess what kind of feedback I want. It tells the reader up front that instead of waiting defensively for critique, I am welcoming it.

Again, I was signaling that I would be easy to help.

Can you see this one coming? Chant with me now the sensible mantra of anyone who wants to do a little climbing within the industry:

Make it as easy as humanly possible for any agent with whom you have contact to help you.

Again, seems self-evident in theory, but it’s not often put into practice. After all, we writers reason, we’re being judged on our writing at the agent-finding phase, not our manners, right? No one sends off a query with the intention of carrying off the Miss Congeniality prize.

Of course, talent alone SHOULD be enough to open the door to success — but honestly, you would be amazed at how many query letters and pitches come across as calculated to make sure that the quality of the writing is the ONLY criterion that could possibly explain acceptance, as if coasting into a professional relationship on the wheels of personal charm were somehow cheating one’s muse.

Seriously, many queries and pitches are downright truculent, or even actually hostile. And half the time, writers do not even seem aware that they are coming across that way. But take a look at some common first impressions agents receive:

Misguided approach 1: Norbert has been working on his novel for a number of years. Having tried his luck at a few small presses, he finds to his chagrin that none of the major publishing houses will even look at an unagented manuscript. His heart sinks when he realizes that he is going to have to invest still more of his precious writing time in finding an agent.

Disgruntled, he sits down at his keyboard to compose his first round of queries. “Since it is impossible to get a fiction publishing contract anymore without an agent,” he writes, “I am writing to see if you will be willing to represent me.”

Okay, what did Norbert do wrong — so wrong, in fact, that few agency screeners would bother to read beyond this tragic first sentence?

While it may seem a trifle unfair to stop reading simply because Norbert has stated a fact about the current state of the publishing industry, from an agency reader’s POV, he is taking his frustration out on the agency for a situation for which the agency is not responsible. It is certainly to agents’ advantage that they have become the gatekeepers of the industry, but the decision to limit how publishing houses accept submissions was the publishers’ decision, not the agents’.

It is human nature to resent being blamed for other people’s actions, but that is not the only reason Norbert’s approach is unlikely to yield positive results. Agents are looking for writers with whom it will be easy to work, and beginning the relationship with what they perceive as whining about necessity — hey, it’s their perception, not mine — does not, in their eyes, convey a cheerful, gung-ho willingness to adapt to the rigors of the publishing world.

They’d rather deal with someone who doesn’t lambaste them. Go figure.

Actually, agents have good reason to be cautious about writers’ attitude problems, you know. Contrary to common belief amongst unagented writers, a writer can seldom simply hand his book to his agent and walk away, confident that it will be sold. Especially a first book. Even if the agent loves a book to pieces, she usually will want changes to it before she begins to market it to editors, to make it easier to sell. A client who complains at every step is going to be harder to handle at this stage, as well as later on, when the manuscript is circulating amongst agents.

Harder how, you ask? Pick up any of the standard agents’ guides, and check out what they almost universally say about nightmare clients: ones who call and e-mail constantly for reassurance, rather than letting their agents get on with the serious business of selling their work.

Norbert’s mistake, then, is that he gave the impression in his query letter that his attitude toward the agency’s role in the publication process would make it hard for the agent to help him succeed. Given a choice, virtually any agent would prefer to help someone who would not bring that anger to the table.

No matter how well-justified that anger might be.

Of course, not all aspiring writers are as up front as Norbert is about his issues. Some prefer to air the ways in which they will be difficult to help indirectly. Tomorrow, I will tell you their sad tales.

In the meantime, take a few minutes to glance over your query letter: does it make you sound like a writer who is going to be hard to help along the path to publication, or like one who would be, if not always a joy, at least a professional who understands that the road is often hard?

It’s worth giving some thought. And, of course, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on As Gandhi famously said, there is more to life than increasing its speed

As Gandhi famously said, there is more to life than increasing its speed

Yesterday, I was discussing the actual submission packet, and I realized that I left out the rather important issue of how to pack it. The post office does in fact sell boxes the right size for manuscripts – if your local PO doesn’t, ask them to order ‘em – as do many office supply stores.

But let the buyer beware: sometimes, the ostensibly manuscript-sized boxes do not comfortably fit a stack of 8 1/2” x 11” paper. The old USPS Priority Mail boxes, provided for free, used to fit two manuscripts beautifully side-by-side, for instance, and they no longer do. Take a sheet of scratch paper with you, and double-check that it will fit in the bottom without wrinkling before you buy.

Whatever you do, though, don’t try to recycle the box your Christmas presents came in for the purpose. Present boxes tend to be too flimsy for cross-country travel. And don’t use a shipping box that a company sent you with the company logo crossed out, as that is considered rather tacky. The ones from Amazon tend to be a perfect footprint for manuscripts, I notice, but don’t yield to the temptation.

“But wait!” I hear the box-savvy cry, “those Amazon boxes are about 4 inches high, and my manuscript is about 2 inches high. Wouldn’t a box that size be too big?”

In a word, no. In general, it’s better to get a box that is a little too big than one that’s a little too small. To keep the manuscript from sliding around and getting crumpled, insert wads of bubble wrap around it. (This technique will also make a larger-sized Priority Mail box work.)

If you’ve been asked to send more than one copy of a manuscript – not all that uncommon after you’ve been picked up by an agent – insert a piece of brightly-colored paper between each copy. Just make sure it’s not construction paper, or the color will rub off on your lovely manuscripts.

I have a few more tips, but since I’m on a faux pas roll anyway, let me present the single most common mistake submitters make as one of my case studies:

Intermezzo scenario 1: After querying for months, Anita receives an e-mail from the agent of her dreams, asking to see the whole manuscript. Alternately overjoyed and petrified (a very common twin state for writers at this juncture, incidentally, although we hear only about the joy), Anita prints up her manuscript that very day. When she plunks down the hefty box and asks to overnight it, she turns pale at the price, but does pays it anyway. An anxious month of waiting later, the manuscript is returned to her, rejected.

What did Anita do wrong? Hint: what she did wrong here probably didn’t have any impact whatsoever on whether the manuscript got rejected or not.

Anita’s error was to overnight the manuscript. It was hugely expensive – and completely unnecessary. It would have gotten exactly the same read had she sent it via the much cheaper Priority Mail, or even regular mail. (Book rate is very, very slow, so I wouldn’t recommend it.)

The more interesting question here is why would Anita, or any other aspiring writer, spend money unnecessarily on postage? One of two reasons, typically. First, many writers assume – wrongly – that an overnighted package is taken more seriously in an agency’s mailroom. In their minds, the mail sorter says, “My God! This must be urgent!” and runs it directly into the agent’s office, where it is ripped open immediately and perused that very day.

Just doesn’t happen. At this point, writers have done this too often for an overnighted package to generate any enthusiasm at all at the average agency. 20 years ago, perhaps, when FedEx was the hot new thing, it might have made a difference, but now, overnight packaging is just another box.

Save yourself some dosh.

The other common reason for overnighting a manuscript is eagerness. Once the request for submission is made, the writer naturally wants everything to happen in a minute: reading, acceptance, book sale, chatting on Oprah. You know, the average trajectory for any blockbuster.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but speed on the writer’s end will not make one iota of difference in how quickly a manuscript is read, or even the probability of its moldering on an agent’s desk for months. Certainly, the differential between the agent’s receiving the manuscript the next day or receiving it in the 2-3 days offered by the more reasonably priced Priority Mail will make no appreciable difference.

This is true, incidentally, even when the agent has ASKED a writer to overnight a project. Consider the plight of poor Bartholomew:

Intermezzo scenario 2: Bartholomew has just won a major category in a writing contest. During the very full pitching day that followed his win, six agents ask him to send submissions. Seeing that he was garnering a lot of interest, Brenda, the most enthusiastic of the agents, requests that Bartholomew overnight the manuscript to her, so she can respond to it right away. Being a savvy submitter, Bartholomew says yes, but submits simultaneously to all six. Within three weeks, he’s heard back from all of them; puzzlingly, Brenda is among the last to respond.

What did Bartholomew do wrong?

He said yes to an unreasonable request. Why was it unreasonable? Because in essence, the situation was no different than if Brenda had asked Bartholomew to leave the conference, jump in his car, drive three hours home to print up a copy of his manuscript for her, drive three hours back, and hand it to her. In both cases, the agent would have been asking the writer to go to unnecessary effort and expense for no reason other than her convenience. As Brenda’s subsequent behavior showed, she had no more intention of reading Bartholomew’s manuscript within the next couple of days than she did of reading it on the airplane home.

Pop quiz: why did she ask him to overnight it at all?

Give yourself full marks if you said it was to get a jump on other interested agents. Remember last week, when I mentioned that agents tend to be competitive people who value book projects in direct proportion to how many other agents are interested in them? This is one way it manifests.

Pause and consider the ramifications of this attitude for a moment. Let them ripple across your mind, like the concentric circles moving gently outward after you throw a stone into a limpid pool, rolling outward until…OH, MY GOD, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE AVERAGE QUERY-GENERATED SUBMISSION?

Uh-huh. Explains quite a bit about why the agent who requested your first 50 pages doesn’t get back to you for two months, doesn’t it? Even though the average agent expects that the writer querying her will be simultaneously querying elsewhere, she will assume, unless you tell her otherwise, that the packet you send her is the only submission currently under any agent’s eyes.

So what’s the rush? It’s only your baby that’s sitting on the edge of her desk for weeks on end.

This is why it is ALWAYS a good idea to mention in your submission cover letter that other agents are reading it, if they are. (I would have to scold you if you lied about this, just to speed up the agent’s sense of urgency.) No need to name names: just say that other agents have requested it, and are reading it even as she holds your pages in her hot little hand.

In the scenario above, Brenda already knows that other agents are interested in Bartholomew’s work; she is hoping to snap him up first. So why didn’t she read it right away?

Give up? Well, Brenda’s goal was to get the manuscript before the other agents made offers to Bartholomew, not necessarily to make an offer before they did.

Is that a vast cloud of confusion I feel wafting from my readers’ general direction? Was that loud, guttural sound a collective “Wha–?”

Relax – it honestly does make sense, when you consider the competition amongst agents. Brenda is aware that she has not sufficiently charmed Bartholomew to induce him to submit to her exclusively; since he won the contest, she also has a pretty good reason to believe he can write. So she definitely wants to read his pages, but she will not know whether she wants to sign him until she reads his writing.

Essentially, Brenda is setting up a situation where Bartholomew will tell her if any of the OTHER agents makes an offer. By asking him to go to the extraordinary effort and expense of overnighting the manuscript to her, she has, she hoped, conveyed her enthusiasm about the book sufficiently that Bartholomew will regard her as a top prospect. Even if he gets an offer from another agent, he’s probably going to call or e-mail her to see if she’s still interested before he signs with anyone else.

If she gets such a call, Brenda’s path will be clear: if she hasn’t yet read his pages, she will ask for a few days to do so before he commits to the other agent. If she doesn’t, she will assume that there hasn’t been another offer. She can take her time and read the pages when she gets around to it.

Again, what’s the rush?

From the agent’s POV, asking a writer to overnight a manuscript is a compliment, not a directive: it’s the agent’s way of saying she’s really, really interested, not that she is going to clear her schedule tomorrow night in order to read it. And even if so, the tantalization will only be greater if she has to live through another couple of days before cloistering herself to read it.

So what should Bartholomew have done instead? The polite way to handle such a request is to say, “Wow, I’m flattered, but I’m booked up for the next few days. I can get it to you by the end of the week, though.” And then he should have Priority Mailed it.

Sound daring? Well, let me let you in on a little secret: in the industry, the party who wants a manuscript overnighted is generally the one who pays for it. After a publisher acquires your book, the house will be paying for you to ship your pages overnight if they need them that quickly, not you. So by asking the writer to pay the costs, the agent is actually stepping outside the norms.

More submission tips, and faux pas avoidance strategies, follow tomorrow. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The short, short lifespan of the novel synopsis

The short, short lifespan of the novel synopsis

As query season is about to descend upon us again – most agencies will have calmed down from the New Year’s Resolution Rush by the end of Martin Luther King, Jr. week – and the PNWA contest deadline approaches, I had intended to begin my promised series on prepping your entries for contest submission today. However, an excellent question from a longtime reader sidetracked me — and I’m pleased it did. Talented and insightful Soyim wrote in to ask:

“Did you have to write a synopsis for the publishing house for which you’re revising your novel? And if so, how long was it? I keep reading that the synopsis has to be as polished as the book itself, but the desired length varies. Some agents suggest 1-2 pages; others say 6 pages or longer.”

Soyim, this is a great question – and a topic, much to my surprise, I had not revisited since June, 2006! So I’m really glad you brought it up. One of the long-term problems of writing this blog is that I have SO much territory to cover that I sometimes forget time passes in between series. Never fear, those of you new to the synopsis-writing process: I’m going to deal with the issue quickly today, and then revisit it within the context of contest entries, to kill as many birds as possible with the few stones at hand.

And if that’s not a gratuitously violent analogy for an essentially positive situation, I should like to know what is.

A synopsis, in case you are unfamiliar with it, is a brief overview of the plot or argument of a book. Often confused with a back jacket blurb, which provides only the premise of the book, the synopsis goes over the entire plot and major characters. Written in the present tense, it provides an agent or contest judge with the essential story arc, demonstrating how the issues raised in the book are resolved.

I did write a synopsis for my novel, but purely for my agent’s eyes, not for the editor’s; as far as I know, the editor for whom I have been making pre-sale revisions has never seen it – of which, more below. It was 5 pages, but I probably could have gotten away with a touch less or a few paragraphs more.

5 pages is industry standard, but as my fair correspondent points out, some ask for longer and shorter. Unless an agent specifically states otherwise, though, you’ll never go wrong with 5 pages.

Yet, as Soyim points out, agency guidelines sometimes ask for much shorter synopses, 1 or 2 pages – and this is maddening, as it would obviously be INFINITELY easier on aspiring writers everywhere if we could simply produce a single submission packet for our work that would fly at any agency in the land. As I have mentioned before, though, however much speakers at conferences, writing gurus, and agents themselves speak of the publishing industry as monolithic, it isn’t: individual agents, and thus individual agencies, like different things.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: no single synopsis you write is going to please everybody in the industry.

Give each what she asks to see. Literally the only pressure for length standardization comes from writers, who pretty uniformly wish that there were a single formula for the darned thing, so they could write it once and never think about it again. I can’t say as I blame them for feeling that way, but the fact is, any given agency wants what it wants.

Why might an agency want a shorter one? Like so much else in the industry, time is the decisive factor: synopses are shorthand reference guides that enable overworked agency staffs (yes, they really are overworked — and often not paid very much, to boot) to sort through submissions quickly. And obviously, a 1-page synopsis takes less time to read than a 5-page one.

As nearly as I can tell, the shorter synopses typically aren’t used for marketing outside the agency at all, Why not? Well, realistically, a 1- or 2-page synopsis is just a written pitch, not a genuine plot summary, and thus not all that useful for an agent to have on hand if an editor starts asking pesky follow-up questions like, “Okay, so what happens next?” (If you’ve never pitched your work verbally to an agent, and want to learn how to do it, please check out the PITCHING TIPS category at right. No matter how good a book is, learning to describe it in terms the entire industry will understand is a learned skill.)

Do I hear some confused murmuring out there? “Wait,” I hear some of you saying, “this makes it sound as though my novel synopsis is never going to see the light of day outside the agency. If I have to spend all of this time and effort perfecting a synopsis, why doesn’t the agent just forward it to editors who might be interested?”

Ah, that would be logical, wouldn’t it? But as with so many other flawed human institutions, logic does not necessarily dictate why things are done the way they are within the industry. Fiction is just not sold that way.

Fiction is sold to publishing houses on the manuscript itself, not the summary. So for a novel, the synopsis is a marketing tool for landing an agent, rather than something that sticks with the book throughout the marketing process. This is not true of nonfiction, where the synopsis is part of the book proposal.

Thus, since my book is a novel, and I already had an agent, it was not necessarily a foregone conclusion that I would have to write a synopsis for it. I just told my agent about it verbally; she read it, then she began shopping it around. (To give you a sense of the timeline on a novel submission, she and I decided last February to start marketing it; I sent her copies in March, and the first round of submissions to editors went out in June. In September, one of the editors asked me to revise the book, pending passing it up the food chain at her publishing house; around Thanksgiving, I was asked if I would be open to a bit more tinkering. I received the second revision request just before Christmas, and I shall be sending the revised manuscript early next week. This, incidentally, was an unusually quick chain of events for the marketing of a first novel.)

Why did my agent have me write a synopsis, then, since I didn’t have to sell her on the book? So she would have an easy reference guide in front of her when she spoke on the phone about the book. Here again, we see the synopsis being used primarily as a tool within the agency, not as a document that markets the book directly to an editor.

And that, my friends, is almost certainly the last anyone will ever see of my novel’s synopsis. R.I.P.

I’m not quite sure why agents aren’t more upfront at conferences about the synopsis being primarily an in-house document when they request it. Ditto with pretty much any other non-manuscript materials they request – indications of target market, author bio, etc. Requiring this kind of information used to be purely the province of the non-fiction agent, who needed it to put together a book proposal. Increasingly over the last decade or so, however, fiction writers are being asked to provide this kind of information to save agents time. Since the tendency in recent years has been to transfer as much of the agents’ work to potential clients as possible, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if agents started asking for the full NF packet from novelists within the next few years.

But let’s not worry about that dread day until it happens, shall we?

And yes, it does need to be ultra-polished (which isn’t really fair, as summaries entail a completely different kind of writing than a book), as does everything you place under a prospective agent’s nose. Synopses are marketing materials, and should be taken as seriously as anything else you write. No matter how good your book is, your best strategic move is to take some time to make your synopsis gorgeous; Miss America may be beautiful au naturale, for all any of us know, but you can bet your last pair of socks that at even the earliest stage of going for the title, she takes the time to put on her makeup with care.

It should be polished because it’s a writing sample, another way to wow the agent. On the bright side, since almost everyone just throws a synopsis together, impressing an agent with one actually isn’t very hard. Being able to include a couple of stunning visceral details, for instance, is going to make you look like a better writer — almost everyone just summarizes vaguely.

My readers, of course, are far too savvy to make that mistake, right?

It’s also helpful if a synopsis gives the impression that the writer is genuinely excited about this book and eager to market it, rather than being deeply and justifiably angry that it needed to be written at all. Believe me, to an experienced eye, writerly resentment shows up BEAUTIFULLY against the backdrop of a synopsis. The VAST majority of novel synopses simply scream that their authors regarded the writing of them as tiresome busywork instituted by the industry to satisfy some sick, sadistic whim prevalent amongst agents, a hoop through which they enjoy seeing all of the doggies jump.

Show that you are professional enough to approach the synopsis as a marketing necessity it is. Remember, agents do NOT ask writers for synopses because they are too lazy to read entire books: they ask for synopses because they receive so many submissions that, even with the best of wills, they could never possibly read them all. The synopsis, then, is your chance to make your work jump up and down and scream: “Me! Me! I’m the one out of 10,000 that you actually want to read, the one written by an author who is willing to work with you, instead of sulking over the way the industry runs!”

Mind you, I’m not saying that you SHOULDN’T sulk over the often arbitrary and unfair way the industry runs: actually, it would be merely Pollyannaish NOT to do that from time to time. Vent as often as you please; it’s healthier than keeping it inside. But it simply is not prudent to vent anywhere near an agent or editor whom you want to take on your work, and certainly not in the tone of the synopsis. The synopsis’ tone should match the book’s, and unless you happen to be writing about deeply resentful characters, it’s just not appropriate to sound clipped and disgruntled.

Sorry. As I believe I have mentioned before, if I ran the universe, not only would manuscripts be judged purely upon the quality of their writing by book-loving souls who would read every submission in full, but there would be free merry-go-rounds in every schoolyard, college tuition would cost nothing, lions and tigers would want nothing more than to cuddle up to humans and purr – and I would have more than a week left before my revision deadline.

However, as my calendar informs me quite clearly every time I sit down to revise, I do not, in fact, run the universe. Unfortunate.

A lot of writers tell me that they find 5 pages a difficult target length for a synopsis. If your draft persists in being less, and you are synopsizing a book-length work, chances are that you are not including the plot or argument in sufficient detail. Remember, your goal here is not just to give the bare bones of the plot, but also to bowl that agency screener over with your incredible storytelling acumen: telling little asides and sensual details can go a long way toward making your synopsis stand out in the crowd.

If you really get stuck about how to make it longer, print up a hard copy of the synopsis, find yourself a highlighting pen, and mark every broad summary statement about character, such as “Bartholomew was a morose man,” as well as every time you have wrapped up a scene or plot twist description with a sentence along the lines of, “and in the process, Sheila learns an important lesson about herself.” These types of statements show up so often in synopses that agents tend to read them as clichés.

Go back through and take a careful look at these highlighted lines: would a 2- or 3-sentence scene SHOW the conclusion stated there better than just TELLING the reader about it? Is there a revealing character detail or an interesting plot nuance that might supplement these general statements, making them more compelling to read?

I’ll let those of you into brevity in on a little secret: given a choice, specifics are almost always more interesting to a reader than generalities. Think about it from an agency screener’s POV, someone who reads 800 synopses per week: wouldn’t general statements about lessons learned and hearts broken start to sound rather similar after awhile? But a genuinely quirky detail in a particular synopsis — wouldn’t that stand out in your mind?

If your synopsis has the opposite problem, and insists upon running over 5 pages (the naughty thing), you should also sit down and read it over with a highlighter gripped tightly in your warm little hand. On your first pass through, mark any sentence that does not deal with the primary plot of the book. Then go back through and read the UNMARKED sentences in sequence, ignoring the highlighted ones. Ask yourself honestly: does the shorter version give an accurate impression of the book?

If your synopsis still runs too long, try this trick of the pros: minimize the amount of space you devote to the book’s premise and the actions that occur in Chapter 1. Much of the time, extensive explanation of these is redundant within the context of the submission.

Why? Well, presumably, if you are sending the synopsis with a query letter, the query itself will state the premise of the book; if you have been asked to send chapters along with the synopsis, as commonly occurs, the agent will already have the actual chapters on hand.

Phew! That was a lighting-paced run through the topic, wasn’t it? Don’t panic, first-timers, if it went by a little fast: as I said, I will revisit the synopsis in my upcoming series on contest entries. If you would like a fuller explanation of the mechanics of the synopsis in the interim, check out the SYNOPSES category at right. And, of course, if you have any questions, feel free to drop me a note via the COMMENTS function.

Thanks, Soyim, for reminding me to come back to this important subject! And everybody, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Making it easier to keep your writing resolutions, Part II, or, yes, I really DO mean it, Marge

Making it easier to keep your writing resolutions, Part II, or, yes, I really DO mean it, Marge

Yesterday, I was discussing ways in which to make it easier to adhere to those New Year’s resolutions about writing more often and more productively. At the end of my day’s ramblings, I advised jump-starting your writing time by playing the same piece of music at the beginning of each writing session, to alert your body that it is time to write.

And the instant I posted the blog, I swear I heard whimpering out there. “But I don’t write to music!” the small voices said plaintively. “I find it distracting. So how do I get myself started?”

Simple. If you are a person who needs to write under conditions of complete silence, try always lighting the same type of incense or scented candle seconds before turning on the computer. Or always pull on the same pair of socks (laundering them occasionally, of course). Or pull your hair into a specific type of ponytail. Or eat a Satsuma. Or turn on that nifty light box you picked up at Ikea that makes colored patterns on the wall.

It actually does not matter what you do, as long as it is a sensual experience that occurs ONLY when you are writing – and is repeated EVERY time you sit down to write. Consistency is the key: otherwise, it isn’t going to work.

And sensual experience is the operative term here: your rational mind already knows that you want to sit down to write. These little rituals are for the benefit your subconscious, that deep, deep well where the hobgoblins of self-doubt like to hang out. No matter how much you tell them that this book needs to be written, those little demons have a comeback. But if you set up a mechanism that teaches them that regardless of how much they poke you after you’ve put on that Run-DMC CD or wafted a lily before your face, you’re going to remain sitting in front of that computer for the next couple of hours, they generally learn to get out of your way, at least for the time being.

If finding the time to write is the problem, pay attention to your normal routine for a week or ten days. Keep a written record of how you spend your time – not just the hours, but the minutes as well. This will help you gain you get a clearer idea of what is and is not immutable in your usual schedule.

Once you have a fair idea of where the time is going, deliberately break some of your major patterns, to figure out where you can squeeze in time to write. Keep records of how you spend this time, too. Switch around chores with your spouse; if you pick up the kids after school, try rearranging your carpool so you drive them there in the morning instead; it may well leave you fresher for evening writing. If you always do the dishes or laundry in the morning, do it late at night; maybe it will turn out that early morning is your prime writing time, and if so, do you really want to fill up that time with housework?

At the end of a week or ten days of seriously messing with your schedule, after your routines are good and disrupted, look back over your account of how you spent your time. What worked and what didn’t? What drove you nuts, and what seemed like a dream come true? Where could you fit in chunks of solid writing time on a regular basis?

Most importantly, did you find that any of your usual time-takers were disposable? Or might you cut back on their frequency? Chances are, you’ll find a few. Be imaginative. If no one actually needed to be hospitalized for ptomaine poisoning because you didn’t scrub down the kitchen like every other week of your adult life, for instance, could you perhaps do it only once per month?

Discuss the results with anyone who happens to be sharing your house, bed, or significant portions of your non-work time. Apart from forcing you to reexamine your habitual use of time, there’s a sneaky reason to do this: many writers are too darned nice or too indelibly responsible or just too habit-bound to expect their family members to change anything about THEIR schedules in order to make room for a loved one’s writing.

Stop blushing. You people know who you are. C’mon, admit it: deep in your hobgoblin-ridden subconscious, you think it’s selfish to ask anyone you love to make even the most minute sacrifice in order to support your life’s work.

Okay, so perhaps no one in your immediate vicinity is spontaneously offering to take a second job so you can quit yours and write full-time. Perhaps you live with people who snarl nastily if you are 45 seconds late in putting their dinners on the table. Or perhaps – and this is far and away the most common cause of the I’m-in-this-alone assumption – you have never actually asked your kith and kin to help you make time to write.

Your writing is important to you, isn’t it? Important enough that you would make sacrifices for it, right? If you suddenly decided to train for the Olympic clean-and-jerk competition, no one would expect your schedule not to rearrange itself a little. So why would writing a book dear to your soul, which is roughly as time-consuming, NOT radically affect how you spend your time?

Or – and this is the rub for a lot of people – how your household spends its time?

Let your mind reel with the possibilities for a moment. What if, say, you were no longer the household resident doing the laundry? Or your teenager cooked dinner twice per week? Or you opted out of hosting your thirty-person family’s Mardi Gras dinner this year? How much time would that free for your writing?

You deserve this time. You are not being selfish to ask for it, and it doesn’t make you a bad person. Actually, by making the effort to evaluate your shared time so carefully, you will be being considerate of other people’s needs, too, because you open up room for negotiation.

But trust me, very, very few writers have the luxury of families, roommates, or friends who spontaneously say, “You know, honey, I’ve been thinking, and you would have two and a half hours of clear time per week to work on your book if I did the grocery shopping for the next six months. Please, please let me do this for you!”

Ask.

Once people who love writers come to understand that writing isn’t a hobby or a whim, but a practice as necessary to the writer’s happiness and well-being as regular exercise, they are often surprisingly accommodating. This is not to say that they won’t kick and scream at first: they probably will. And they may well try to trespass on your time, to see if you really mean it. This is especially likely to happen if you have not yet proven by day-in, day-out effort that you are committed to taking the time to work, rather than getting distracted. If you expect your kith and kin to take your writing time seriously, you need to take it seriously, too.

And that, in case you’re wondering, is why my fiancé’s mother is absolutely petrified of me. She called once too often during my writing time — and she still has the burn marks on her ear to prove it.

Having grown up in a family of writers, I can tell you with absolute confidence: when intensive writing schedules work, it’s because EVERYONE in the household is actively cooperating to make that happen, starting in babyhood. A professional writer’s kid learns to go to sleep by the sound of typing (and actually, the sound of a manual typewriter still makes me groggy, speaking of conditioned reflexes), and to this day, I seldom raise my voice above quiet conversational level, lest there be someone writing in the next room. It’s habit, like everything else.

Yes, it is hard to change ongoing patterns — but in the middle of a major, editor-induced revision, I would be the last person on earth to tell you that being a writer is easy. But think about it: if I had not put down my wee foot years ago and said, “Look, if you love me, you’re going to need to change a few things to accommodate my writing,” and didn’t keep stomping that foot to make sure it happened, what kind of a fix would I be in now? The day you suddenly receive the edits that are going to take you three weeks of 16-hour days to finish is NOT the best time to say for the first time, “Um, honey, I think we need to talk.”

Selfish? Maybe, but I think not. And you know what? I’ve made dinner a grand total of once in the last two weeks, and my revision is proceeding right on schedule. And no one, with the possible exception of my prospective mother-in-law, seems to think this makes me a bad person. And she’s getting over it.

Ask for some help. And keep up the good work!