Realistic expectations for queriers – Page 3 – Author! Author!:: Anne Mini's Blog

September 8, 2011January 19, 2017 - 4 Comments

The logic behind the SASE, or, how to be prepared for something falling on you from a zeppelin

Last time, I broached the subject of the infamous and ubiquitously-requested SASE, industry-speak for the Stamped, Self-Addressed Envelope (get it?) that should accompany every mailed query letter and/or submission packet. (E-mailed queries and submissions cannot include them, obviously, as these forms of communication have no temporal heft to them.) There’s no such thing as a Get Out of Thinking About It pass on this one, I’m afraid: forgetting to include a SASE in a query is an instant-rejection offense at virtually every agency in North America.

Or, to put that in terms even Narcissus could understand, no matter how gifted, talented, and/or beautiful a writer or his work may happen to be, neglecting this small piece of industry etiquette effectively assures that Millicent the agency screener will not spend enough time with ol’ Narcissus’ query packet to find out that he and his work display any or all of these delightful attributes. The packet will simply be rejected unread.

And not merely because Narcissus’ nasty habit of assuming that the rules that apply to ordinary mortals could not possibly apply to him is darned annoying to anyone who has to deal with him professionally. If the agent decides to pick up the manuscript, the writer’s having included the expected SASE demonstrates a pleasing ability to follow directions — and if the agent decides to pass, s/he may return rejected pages at the writer’s expense.

Yes, I know: it’s trying to be expected to underwrite one’s own rejection, but there actually are some benefits for the SASE-provider in this arrangement. To name but one: actually finding out that your query has in fact been rejected, rather than gnawing your fingernails in perpetual worry for a year or two.

Oh, you would prefer to be left to wonder whether (a) the agency has a policy of not informing rejected queriers if the answer is no (quite common), (b) the agency has a policy of not reading incomplete query packets (like, say, those that omit a SASE), or (c) your packet got stuck sideways in the mailbox, and never reached the agency at all?

The expectation that an aspiring writer will always include a SASE with any kind of paper query or submission is universal, at least among U.S. agencies and publishers, so much so that I’ve noticed that many agencies don’t even explain what it means on their websites or listings in the standard guides anymore. It’s become one of those secret handshake things, a practice that the industry just assumes that any writer who is serious about getting published will magically know all about without being told.

Call me zany, but as those of you have been reading this blog for a while are already aware, I’m not a big fan of unspoken assumptions; they place the writer new to the game at a serious strategic disadvantage. So I hope those of you who have been at this for some time will forgive my taking a second post to explain to those new to querying what a SASE is and why, to put it bluntly, the writer is expected to pay the postage for a rejection letter or returned manuscript.

SASE logic seems to be counterintuitive for many aspiring writers. Contrary to popular opinion, a SASE shouldn’t always take the form of a business-size envelope; it varies according to what was sent in the first place. To accompany a single-page query, it’s letter-sized, but should you happen to be querying an agency whose guidelines call for writers to include more than five pages of additional materials (e.g., writing sample, synopsis, author bio, book proposal, a chapter or two), you’d be sending that in a Manila envelope, right? In that case, the SASE would need to be a second Manila envelope, stuffed inside the first, carrying sufficient materials to ship all of those additional materials back to you.

Oh, you hadn’t been thinking of the SASE in those terms? Or was that giant whoosh I heard not a collective gasp, but a whole bunch of eyebrows out there hitting the ceiling?

Probably the latter, I’m guessing, because I’m constantly meeting aspiring writers who are unaware that a SASE should also accompany a manuscript submission. That tends to come as a great big surprise to even writers who have been querying and submitting for a while: since the prevailing wisdom is that the point of the SASE is ease of getting back to a writer to say yes or no, it’s far from uncommon for submitters of 500-page manuscripts to include a simple business-size envelope as a SASE. While certainly understandable, this misses the primary goal of the SASE: ensuring the safe return of whatever a writer sends to an agency.

Thus, you should always include enough postage on your SASE that everything you submitted may be popped into it and mailed with a minimum of effort on the sender’s part. That means, in practice, including a shipping container (second envelope, box, or a shipping label to affix to the box in which you sent the manuscript) already addressed to you with enough postage to get all of those requested pages back to you in one piece.

Since all of that will need to be tucked into the same envelope or box that contains your query, any materials the agency’s submission guidelines request, and/or requested materials, it can get cumbersome, once the time comes to pack it all up. Not to say expensive, especially for writer submitting to US-based agencies from outside the country, who not only have to figure out what the return postage would be in dollars instead of their local currency, but have to wrap their eager fingertips around some US stamps.

Don’t worry, foreign readers: there’s a trick to it. I’ll be getting to that.

I’m constantly barraged with questions from readers about why, in the age of fairly universal paper recycling and cheap, high-quality printers, a writer shouldn’t just ask an agent to recycle a rejected manuscript. Quoth, for instance, clever reader Melospiza:

Why on earth would you want your manuscript back (after it has been rejected)? It won’t be pristine enough to send out again. Why spend the money? And any parcel over one pound can’t be dropped in a mailbox, but must be taken to the post office, not something an agent will appreciate. Let the agent recycle the paper and enclose a (business-size) SASE only.

Oh, would only that were possible, Melospiza, but there’s a rather basic, practical reason to include the SASE for safe return of the manuscript. Chant it with me now, campers: as with a SASEless query, not including a SASE in a submission is usually an automatic-rejection trigger.

Yes, you read that correctly: leaving a SASE out of the submission packet can, and often does, result in a submission’s being rejected unread; ask about it sometime at a writers’ conference. The vast majority of agents will be perfectly up front about the fact that they train their screeners accordingly.

The owners of all of those eyebrows are clutching their heads now, aren’t they, thinking of all of those SASEless submissions — or, more likely, submissions accompanied by only a #10 SASE, rather than one with sufficient postage for the manuscript’s return — they sent out in the dark days of yore. “Okay, I can understand why Millicent would reject SASE-free queries without reading them,” the head-clutchers cry, “but why, in heaven’s name, would an agent who asked to see pages reject them unread?”

Good question, retrospective panickers. The short answer: because it’s obvious to Millicent that a writer who submits without a manuscript-size SASE doesn’t know the secret handshake.

The longer answer is hardly more comforting, I’m afraid. In the publishing industry, it’s considered downright rude for a writer not to include a SASE both large enough and loaded down with enough pre-paid postage to send — wait for it — EVERYTHING enclosed back to the sender. If the SASE isn’t tucked into the packet, or if the postage is not sufficient, and if the agency is going to keep its side of the tacit agreement allowing it to read a writer’s unpublished work, it is going to have to shell out the dosh to mail the rejected manuscript back. Ditto with a query letter that arrives unaccompanied by a SASE.

The result in both cases is generally a form-letter rejection — which costs the agency not only the price of the return postage, but also an envelope and Millicent’s time to address it — or, as is increasingly popular, no response at all. Yes, even for a submission. Pages often go bye-bye, because it would be expensive for the agency to ship back the whole shebang.

I implore you, no matter how little you want to see that manuscript again, do not omit the SASE for the return of the manuscript. Unless, of course, the agency’s website or listing in one of the standard agency guides says specifically that they will recycle rejected manuscripts. (Practically none of them do, but check anyway.)

“You must be pulling our collective leg, Anne,” I hear some of you muttering. “Okay, maybe SASEless queries do tend to get rejected unread, but I can’t believe that it happens to submitted manuscripts or book proposals. By the time an agent is sufficiently interested in you to want to see actual chapters of your book, your foot is too firmly in the door for your submission to be tossed aside unread for a reason as unrelated to the quality of the writing as not including a SASE. I mean, really, what purpose would being that touchy serve?”

A fairly tangible one, actually: it would be one less manuscript for Millicent to read.

Remember, it’s her job to reject 98% of what crosses her desk; even a very successful agent at a giant agency seldom picks up more then 5 or 6 new clients per year, even including ones poached from other agencies. (Which happens all the time, by the way. It would astonish most aspiring writers to know just how many of us agented writers are unhappy with our current representation. As I say early and often, you don’t want just any agent to represent you — you want a well-connected, fully engaged agent who loves your writing and will defend it to the death.) Every submission that disqualifies itself on technical grounds is another step toward that ongoing goal of thinning the pack of contenders.

Do you really want to volunteer your precious manuscript for that particular kamikaze mission?

Admittedly, from the submitter’s point of view, a good argument could be made that this practice inevitably leads to, as Melospiza rightly points out, a big ol’ waste of money, not to mention trees, without really providing much benefit to the gentle, tolerant souls who actually pay for the return postage. After all, from the writer’s perspective, a SASE included with a submission is only going to be used if the news is bad. If the agency likes a partial, they’re going to ask to see the entire manuscript — which means your initial submission will get filed, you will send another packet (with another SASE), and your first SASE may well end up in the trash.

Or, if you’re really lucky, you’ll never see it again, because it will end up in a file drawer in your new agent’s office. Fingers crossed!

If, on the other hand, the agent of your dreams does not like it, all you are doing by providing the postage is paying to get the news that they’re turning you down in a way that will make your postal carrier’s back ache, rather than via a nice, light #10 envelope. So why not just send the manuscript along with a business-size SASE, and be done with it?

Because that’s not how the industry works, that’s why. (See commentary above re: secret handshakes.)

If you’re willing to risk it, you could always include a line in the cover letter, politely asking the agency to recycle the manuscript if they decide not to offer representation and mentioning the business-sized SASE enclosed for their reply. Do be aware, however, that this strategy sometimes backfires with screeners trained to check first for a manuscript-sized SASE: it’s not unheard-of for the Millicents of the world to toss aside such a manuscript without reading the cover letter.

As I believe I may have mentioned before, I don’t make the rules of submission; I only try to render them comprehensible. Let’s all pray that when Millicent does engage in the summary rejection of the SASEless, she flings that precious ream of paper into a recycling bin.

Originally, the whole paper-wasting arrangement was set up this way in order to protect writers. The logic behind this one is so pre-computer — heck, it’s pre-recycling, if you don’t count Abe Lincoln’s scrawling the Gettysburg Address on the back of a used envelope — that it’s likely to be counterintuitive to anyone querying or submitting for the first time today.

Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when books were widely read, writers didn’t need agents because publishing houses still read through their slush piles, and the photocopier had not yet been invented. Prior to the advent of personal computers (and nice laser printers in workplaces that might conceivably be accessible after the boss goes home for the day), you could not print out spare copies of your precious manuscript to submit to every Tom, Dick, and Random House in the biz, obviously. Nor could you attach a Word document to an e-mail and send it off via Pony Express. Or even pop down to the corner copy store to run off half a dozen copies.

Equally obviously, no sane human being would entrust her only copy of a manuscript to the vagaries of the mails. So how did writers reproduce their work to submit to several publishing houses or agencies simultaneously?

They retyped it, that’s how. Every single page, every single syllable, every single time.

Think those hardy souls wanted to get their rejected manuscripts back? Darned tootin’. It might save them weeks of retyping time.

My long-term readers will have heard my favorite concrete example of how these returned manuscripts helped writers before, but it’s such a terrific illustration of just how much the SASE used to assist the average aspiring writer that I have no qualms about trotting it out again. Back in the far-away 1950s, my mother, Kleo, was married to Philip, a struggling science fiction writer. While she toiled away at work and went to school, Philip spent his days composing short stories.

Dozens of them. Type, type, type, week in, week out. She would come home and edit them; he would type a revised version. One or the other of them would get a good idea, and they would collaborate in writing the result: one dictating, one typing. She would take them to writing classes and the magazine editors who were already publishing her brother’s SF short stories, returning with still more feedback. Off he went to type another draft.

From scratch. Every single time either of them wanted to change a word. Hard for those of us who write on computers even to imagine, isn’t it?

As writers did in those dark days prior to e-mail, Philip and Kleo stuffed each of those short stories into gray Manila envelopes with a second envelope folded up inside as a SASE and sent them off to any magazine that had evinced even the remotest interest in SF or fantasy. (Except for the ones that Kleo hand-sold by taking to a magazine editor, which is actually how Philip got his first story published. She was, in effect, his original agent. But I digress.)

Each time a short story was rejected — as, in the beginning, all of Philip’s and Kleo’s were — and landed once again in their mailbox with the accuracy of a well-flung boomerang, they acted as professional writers should act: they submitted the rejected story to another magazine immediately. To minimize retyping, they would iron any pages that had gotten bent in the mail, slip the manuscript into a fresh envelope (yes, with a fresh SASE), and pop it into the mail.

Since there were not very many magazines that accepted SF or fantasy back then, they had to keep impeccable records, to avoid sending a rejected story back to a magazine that had already refused it. But Philip kept typing away, and kept as many stories in circulation at once as possible.

How many? Well, no one knows for sure anymore — since occasionally the only copy of a story got sent by mistake, some inevitably got lost.

(Which reminds me to nag those of you sending out manuscripts in the computer age: when was the last time you made a back-up of your manuscript? If, heaven forfend, a gigantic anvil fell from one of those anvil-toting zeppelins we’re always seeing overhead these days onto your main writing space, would it crush both your computer and your back-ups? Do you really want to be crawling about in the ashes, frantically trying to find the remnants of your hard disk?)

One day, the young couple opened their front door to find 17 rejected manuscripts spread all over their minuscule front porch. Their tiny mailbox apparently hadn’t been able to hold that many emphatic expressions of “No!”

So what did the aspiring writers of yesteryear do when faced with that many rejections on the same day? Did they toss all of that paper into the recycling bins that had not yet been invented? Did they rend their garments and give up writing forever? Did they poison their perfectly nice mail carrier for bringing so much bad news all at once?

No, they did what professional writers did back then: Philip had his wife iron the pages so they could be sent out again and resubmitted.

Lest you find the story depressing, the science fiction writer was Philip K. Dick, and one of those stories was THE MINORITY REPORT. Which a director who shall remain nameless (because he changed the ending in a way that would have caused any author’s resentful spectre to dive-bomb LA, howling) made into a rather lucrative movie, decades later.

Which only goes to show you: contrary to the common writerly fantasy/daydream/self-flagellation-after-rejection theme, even the best writers generally have to brazen through quite a bit of rejection before hitting the big time. As my mother likes to say, the only manuscript that stands NO chance of getting published is the one that sits in the bottom drawer, unseen by human eyes.

Admittedly, it was not the most comforting lullaby to have sung above one’s cradle, but she knew whereat she spoke. It’s as true today as it was six decades ago, when there were no photocopying machines, no computers, and no guarantee that the copy you sent would ever be retrievable if it went astray in some publisher’s office.

For our purposes today, the important thing to take away from this story is not the warm glow from the implied pep talk (although that’s nice, too), but the understanding that agencies don’t ask for SASEs in order to inconvenience, annoy, or impoverish aspiring writers. They do it today for precisely the same reason that they did it in the 1950s: to get your work back to you as expeditiously as possible, so you may try its fortunes elsewhere.

You’re welcome.

Also, as I mentioned last time, the practice was intended to protect the writer’s copyright. Just as an e-mailed attachment could conceivably end up, through the magic of multiple forwarding, anywhere on the planet, a loose manuscript that isn’t either in an agent or editor’s office, safely tucked away in that proverbial bottom desk drawer, or being conveyed through sleet, snow, and/or dark of night between one and the other could in fact be stolen.

I know; creepy even to consider. But think about it: is it more or less likely than something pointy falling on your house from a zeppelin?

I’ll answer that one for you: it does happen from time to time, so a savvy writer keeps very, very good track of who precisely has his manuscript when. (If this prospect tends to keep you up at night, please see the SHOULD I WORRY ABOUT MY WORK BEING STOLEN? category on the list at right for tips on how to protect your work.)

Three other things of which a savvy writer keeps very good track: which agents she has already queried (and with what unsolicited-but-permitted extra materials), which already-queried agents have requested materials (and what they requested; every agency asks for the submission packet to contain different components), and which agents are still waiting for her to send them those materials. If an aspiring writer is querying and/or submitting to multiple agents at once — and she should, unless the agent of her dreams has a no simultaneous submissions policy — she had better maintain excellent records; otherwise, it’s just too easy to mix things up.

Or not to know where to send Query #18 when the first 17 SASEs turn up in her mailbox. Or her inbox.

Speaking of minding the details, a savvy writer also takes care when applies postage to her SASE. Let’s take a gander at what postage-related fears were keeping intrepid reader Rachel up at night:

I have a question about the SASE that you put in with your materials. I understand it was always better to use stamps so that the agent can just toss it in the outgoing mail bin at the agency. But I was talking to the postal clerks yesterday and they said that post-911 rules are now in effect: any stamped package over 13 ounces has to be brought to the post. I asked to get metered mail instead, and they said it wouldn’t work because it would have that date (yesterday) on it. A dilemma!

I explained my situation to them and the clerks suggested just using a priority stamp (and the same shipping box), because if a SASE were expected, then stamps are really the only way to go. Is that how they’re doing it now?

Good question, Rachel. Before I answer it, let’s clarify the situation by reiterating the difference between a query packet’s SASE (a missive containing the query letter + any unsolicited materials an agency’s website said were permissible to send with it) and one tucked into a submission (requested materials).

When sending a query, SASE use is pretty straightforward: the writer takes a second envelope, writes his own address on it, adds appropriate postage, folds it, and stuffs it — neatly, please, as becomes a Sanitary Author — into the query envelope. (Oh, like you’ve been able to get the SA out of your mind since yesterday’s post.)

When sending a submission packet, the process is similar, but the packaging is different. If the agent only asks to see limited number of pages, few enough that they could be comfortably placed in a Manila envelope without wrinkling them (the Sanitary Author deplores crumpled pages; so do many agents), all you need to do is take a second Manila envelope, self-address it, affix the same amount of postage you’re going to use to send the whole packet to the agency, fold it, and place it neatly within the submission envelope.

Don’t worry; I shall be devoting some of our collective time in the week to come to explaining how to handle a request for a partial. I wouldn’t leave you hanging.

SASE-wrangling becomes a bit trickier if you’ve been asked to send the entire manuscript, because that generally entails using a box. (For a detailed explanation of what types of box should and shouldn’t be used, complete with glamorous photographs of cardboard in its various manifestations, again, tune in tomorrow.)

Obviously, it’s going to be unwieldy to stuff a second box inside the first, so it’s completely acceptable just to include a self-addressed mailing label and postage. Be sure to mention both in your cover letter, so they won’t get lost on the agency end. (Again, don’t panic: I’ll be talking about how to pull off including such necessary-but-prosaic details gracefully early next week.

If you have already submitted a partial, and then the agent asks for the whole manuscript, don’t just send the rest of the pages: by the time they arrive, Millicent probably will not have a clear enough recollection of the partial just to pick up the story where your initial submission left off. (Heck, by then, Millicent may already have moved on to pastures new; the turnover amongst screeners can be pretty remarkable.) Send the entire manuscript, in the aforementioned box.

Equally obviously (but I’m going to mention it anyway, just in case), the stamps on the SASE need to be US stamps, if the agency is US-based. That requirement means that SASEing is invariably a great deal more challenging — and expensive — for writers in foreign climes querying or submitting to US agencies. The far-flung are not exempt from the SASE expectation, I’m afraid, which can make e-mailed querying a more attractive option.

Good news for the far-flung: the US Postal Service’s website sells stamps at face value, rather than at the exorbitant mark-up one frequently finds for them abroad. The USPS more than happy to ship ‘em to your doorstep in exotic climes so you may stick ‘em onto your SASE before popping your submission into the mail.

But let’s get back to the crux of Rachel’s question: has the post-9/11 alteration in post office policy altered what agencies expect to see on a SASE?

The last decade has indeed seen some changes in how agencies handle packages, but actually, most of them date from before 9/11, back to the anthrax scare. Before that, virtually no agency accepted electronic submissions. A few scary mailings later, and suddenly, agencies all over New York were opening e-mail accounts. Hey, they may not pay their Millicents much, but the average agency certainly doesn’t want its screeners to get sick from opening a poisoned query envelope.

E-mailed queries and submissions don’t carry the risk of that sort of infection (and I think we can all guess how the Sanitary Author would feel about that). They do, however, occasionally contain computer viruses, so few agents will open an attachment unless they have already specifically requested an electronic submission from a writer.

That’s why, in case you’d been wondering, most agencies have policies forbidding e-queriers from sending unsolicited materials as attachments. Too much risk of computer contamination. Instead, they will usually ask queriers to copy any permissible additional materials and paste them into the body of an e-mail.

Rachel’s clerk was quite right about heavier packages having to be physically carried into the post office by human being, rather than blithely dropped into a mailbox or dumped in a mailroom — a policy shift that would affect virtually any submitted full manuscript, since they tend to be heavy little critters. However, that most emphatically does not mean is that the agent is going to be taking a rejected manuscript to the post office herself, or even that the Millicent who screened it will. Some luckless agency intern will be toting a whole mess of them there every few days.

Or not; since the USPS changed its regulations in this respect, many agencies have side-stepped the return mail problem by ceasing to return submitted manuscripts to their writers at all. (Sensing a pattern here?) Check policies before you submit.

Interestingly, agencies that operate this way virtually always still expect submitters to include SASEs with their submissions. Go figure. The moral: unless you are querying or submitting electronically OR an agency specifically says it doesn’t use SASEs, you should always include one.

And always use actual stamps, rather than metered postage. It’s called a STAMPED, self-addressed envelope for a reason, you know. The goal here is not merely convenience in mailing, but the submitter’s paying for his own manuscript’s return. Regardless of whether that means tossing it into the nearest mailbox (which would still be possible for most partial manuscripts) or assigning Millicent to do it, stamps have always served the purpose best.

That being said, I must confess that I don’t quite understand the clerk’s recommendation to Rachel to affix Priority Mail postage to the SASE, unless he was either lobbying her to use a flat-rate Priority Mail envelope as a SASE (not a bad idea, especially if the submission is just a few chapters; they fold nicely into a submission envelope) or simply trying to hawk a more expensive stamp. The distinction between Priority Mail and regular mail is the speed with which it arrives; the ease of mailing is identical.

Buying a more expensive stamp or a cheaper one to affix to the SASE is entirely up to the writer; coughing up the dosh for speedier return is not going to impress Millicent. Like overnighting requested materials vs. sending them regular mail, whether a submitter elects to pay a shipper extra money to convey a manuscript from point A to point B is generally a matter of complete indifference to the agent receiving it, as long as it gets there in one piece.

(“And looking pretty,” adds the Sanitary Author. “None of those pesky wrinkles. Print your manuscript on nice, bright-white, 20-pound paper while you’re at it, please. It’s aesthetically more pleasing than the cheap stuff.”)

To be blunt about it, the agent has absolutely no reason to care how quickly a rejected manuscript reaches its submitter. All she’s going to care about is whether you’ve included the means to mail it back to you at your expense, not hers.

And that, my friends, is the logic that most agencies’ listings in the standard agency guides and websites compress into the terse advice Include SASE. Apparently, somewhere on earth, there lurks a tribe of natural-born queriers who realize from infancy precisely what that means, so it requires no further explanation.

I’ll bet our old pal, the Sanitary Author, is one of that happy breed. For the rest of us, learning how agencies work requires a bit of homework — and the asking of trenchant questions. Keep up the good work!

September 7, 2011January 19, 2017 - No Comments

Nicely stamping your SASE and other Millicent-pleasing habits of the Sanitary Author

sanitary-author

Why, yes, now that you mention it, long-time Author! Author! habitués, I have used this photograph before. Several times, in fact: it’s one of my favorites, for reasons I shall discuss below. Although, really, does cultivating and maintaining an affection for the mythical Sanitary Author require much defense?

Before I launch into that very defense, however, I have some good news to announce about a member of our little community: Austin Gary’s novel, Miss Madeira has just come out in paperback and as an e-book. Congratulations, Austin!

If Austin’s name sounds familiar, it should: he was one of the literary fiction winners in the Author! Author! Rings True Competition earlier this year, albeit for another work. Nor his he a stranger to award winning: under the name Gary Heyde, he is also a BMI award-winning songwriter, with recordings by Tammy Wynette, John Berry, and Jeff Carson.

Miss Madeira was semi-finalist in the 2009 Faulkner-Wisdom fiction competition. Here’s the blurb:

Brilliant teacher Amelia Madeira is torn between her love for the woman who will eventually become her sister-in-law and a gifted male student. Despite producing several generations of students forever known as Madeira’s Kids, gossip begins to grow like apples on a poison tree. As anyone with an intimate knowledge of the workings of small-town America knows, episodic memory is the bailiwick of barbershops, beauty shops, and pool halls.

Keep that good news rolling in, folks. Celebrating our fellow writers’ triumphs substantially eases the long and curvy road to publication.

Back to business. Since I’m aware that many of you are rushing about madly, pulling together flotillas of post-Labor Day queries and submissions, I thought it would be a good time to devote a few days to how query and submission packets should be put together.

Yes, yes, I know: not the sexiest of topics, but lest we forget, Millicent the agency screener is charged not only with assessing the aptness of a queried or submitted manuscript for her agency’s representation list; she’s also going to be drawing some conclusions from the packets about the querier or submitter’s professionalism. Why is that relevant, you ask? Because a writer who has taken the time to learn how the publishing industry expects to see writing presented is going to be less energy-consuming to represent.

Before anyone bristles at the idea that an agency — not a non-profit entity, usually — might consider non-literary factors such as the ability to present writing professionally when weighing the pros and cons of picking up a particular writer, let me recommend that those of you who feel strongly on the subject have a spirited discussion about it in the comments. My goal here is not to judge how agencies operate, but to help good writers navigate the often opaque and counterintuitive querying and submission process.

For the next few days, then, I am going to be talking in minute detail about how to put together professional-looking query and submission packets. To lead gently into that noble endeavor, let us pause and consider the mystery of the Sanitary Author.

I’m not much given to double-takes, campers, but I must admit, I did a lulu when I spotted this sign standing by the side of a two-lane highway in unincorporated Neskowin, Oregon. To the casual observer, Neskowin is a blink-and-you-miss-it collection of buildings, but to the observant passerby, it is fraught with enigma. Among its mysteries: according to its ostensibly unofficial municipal website (last updated, apparently, in 2008) Neskowin’s population is a sparse 170, a human density that renders the two golf courses located there, well, surprising.

Who is playing golf in such high numbers that a lone course wasn’t deemed sufficient for local needs? Bears? Sea lions? Migratory Scots with an affection for Pacific Rim cuisine?

All of these legitimate wonders pale, however, next to the enigma of the Sanitary Author. What makes him or her so darned clean, the passing motorist is left to speculate, and why is the population of Neskowin so proud of that particular resident’s hygiene habits that the non-city fathers saw fit to erect a sign to commemorate the SA’s immaculate practices? Did s/he win some sort of international award for cleanliness, a plaudit akin to the Nobel Prize, in order to raise him or her so very high in the town’s esteem?

Not, obviously, as high as videos, coffee, or ice cream, but let’s face it, it’s more recognition than most authors get.

Does the SA reside in remote forest because such cleanly writing practices would not have been feasible within the confines of a large city like New York, Los Angeles, or even charming and nearby Portland? More importantly from the point of view of fellow authors, how does being so sanitary affect the quality of the SA’s writing — and if it has a net positive effect, should we all be beating a path to Oregon, clamoring to follow in the SA’s spotless footsteps?

And I don’t want to alarm anybody, but should we be worried about all of the unsanitary authors running around out there? The mind positively reels at the vast array of germs Millicent could conceivably pick up from their query and submission packets.

Oh, I know what prosaic types out there are likely to say: since the period after AUTHOR would tend to indicate an abbreviation, this sign probably only refers to the local sanitary authority, the fine municipal employees who look after water quality and maintain the sewer system. So much for impenetrable ambiguity, the literal would doubtless conclude. Just ignore that sasquatch strolling by; there’s nothing to see here.

But look closely at that sign: there’s a period after SANITARY, too. Complete words are seldom abbreviations, I find.

So the mystery continues. I shall make a valiant effort to wrest my mind away from the Sanitary Author and concentrate on the matter at hand: queries and the things that accompany them.

Oh, it’s no use: the image is burned into my brainpan. A psychologist friend of mine once told me that recent research demonstrates that the brain can respond as dramatically to recalled memories as to present life; sometimes, she says, the mind will experience flashbacks as current events. I’m fascinated by this, not only as a memoirist (and yes, the memoir that was supposed to come out a few years ago is still tied up in legal knots; thanks for asking), but as a novelist.

The writer’s descent into a creative trance is one of the least-understood of human phenomena, isn’t it? Don’t know what I’m talking about? Ask your kith and kin what you’re like during periods of intensive writing.

Personally, when I’m in mid-chapter, I have been known to lose my sense of the passage of time. If my cats didn’t remind me occasionally that they do not possess opposable thumbs or the ability to open cabinets (well, okay, most cabinets), they would probably be forced to start nibbling on my toes under my desk to stave off imminent starvation.

I’m inclined to blame this on the way that the creative process colonizes the writer’s brain. The cats seem inclined to blame it on me, which I suppose amounts to more or less the same thing: if a task can’t wait until I polish the scene in front of me to a high gloss, it’s probably not going to happen.

You may be unusually good at jumping back and forth between the creative and observational parts of your brain, but if you’re writing on a regular basis, I’m betting that those who have the good fortune to live and work with you have built up a stockpile of anecdotes about how you space out on the minutiae of quotidian life when you’re writing hard. Or — and I honestly am getting around to the point of today’s post again — when you are embroiled in sending out the aforementioned flotilla of queries.

Oh, you thought you were the only one who spaced out? Far from it. Little things like laundry, taking vitamins, watering plants, and checking e-mail seem to slip unnoticed out of the working writers’ consciousness in the middle of a querying binge or writing jag — and don’t even get me started on how the amnesia about practicalities can intensify in the face of an imminent deadline or, heaven help us, immediately after an agent asks to see a partial or full manuscript.

I suspect that this checking out from the everyday world is a necessary side effect of the alchemy of creation. Because, really, in order to render our characters’ lifeworlds gripping on the page, we writers have to create them in our minds every bit as vividly and in all of the detail of a vitally important memory. That’s a pretty absorbing task, isn’t it?

With a pretty gratifying payoff, potentially: if we do our job very well indeed, we might create a story, a situation, a character that seems to the reader to have stepped straight out of real life. Only better.

Is it that same is-it-real-or-is-it-Memorex trick of the brain, I wonder, that would allow a reader to fall in love with a character in a novel? As recent Nobel laureate — and about time, too — Mario Vargas Llosa wrote in THE PERPETUAL ORGY:

A handful of fictional characters have marked my life more profoundly than a great number of the flesh-and-blood beings I have known.

He’s talking about a literary orgy, incidentally, not a physical one: quite a lot of the book is devoted to his passionate decades-long love affair with the entirely fictional Emma Bovary. And who can blame him for falling in love with her, really? She’s a pretty absorbing character.

Do I sense those of you who intended to get queries and/or submissions out the door now that the annual post-Labor Day return of the publishing world to New York has arrived becoming a bit restless in the face of these musings? “I’m as fond of the creative haze as anyone else,” I hear some of you stalwart souls say, “but right now, most of my writing time is getting eaten up by the process of trying to find an agent. So if you don’t mind my asking, what does any of this have to do with the very practical marketing concerns we’ve spent much of the summer discussing?”

A couple of things, actually. First, in the throes of agent-seeking, it can be pretty easy to forget that query-screeners like Millicent actually are looking to fall in love with some writer’s work.

The querying hurdle is, at least in principle, set in place to maximize the probability of discovering the next Great American Novel — or memoir, or nonfiction book — by freeing agency staff from the necessity of reading pages from every ambitious soul currently writing in English. That way, the theory goes, Millicent can concentrate on deciding amongst the crème de la crème.

Your mind is still focused on the paragraph before last, isn’t it? Yes, you did indeed read that correctly: even the most virulent rejection-generator is usually eager to discover a novel that pulls her immediately into its lifeworld, or a memoir that wrings her heart, or the next Emma Bovary. I don’t think it’s at all coincidental that agents and editors so often describe their first responses to submissions in the language of attraction: you’re going to love this book, it’s a sexy topic, it didn’t grab me, I can’t get this book off my mind, I just didn’t fall in love with the protagonist.

Set those to music, and you’ve got a pop song. (Perhaps Austin could do something with it.) As hard as it may be to believe, Millicent is waiting to be swept off her feet.

Which is why, in case any of you have been wondering, I tend to discuss querying and submission in romantic terms: the query letter is a personal ad for your book; you want attract not just any agent, but the one that’s the best match for you and your work; the first page needs to seduce Millicent into wanting to read on; the chemistry between an agent and a book matters deeply. Ditto between a book and an editor.

So in addition to everything else we writers are trying to create, our writing also need to inspire love.

The interminable and annoying querying/submission process sounds substantially nobler put that way, doesn’t it? Feel free to use this argument the next time some non-writer gapes at the amount of time you’ve invested in trying to land an agent; generating love can take some time.

My second reason for bringing up this high-falutin’ topic is, I’m afraid, disappointingly prosaic. I meant to begin this post by talking about SASEs (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelopes), and I seem to have gotten sidetracked.

I can only plead that I was absorbed in my writing. Excuse me a moment while I feed my languishing cats.

Or perhaps I zoned out because, let’s face it, SASEs are not the most thrilling of topics. But they are absolutely vital to discuss, because a mailed query or submission unaccompanied by a SASE will get rejected automatically at virtually every U.S. agency. Almost invariably without being read.

Pause to ponder the implications, please: if Millicent doesn’t read your query, it’s literally impossible for her to decide to request your manuscript, and therefore impossible for her to fall in love with your writing. Which, in turn, renders it impossible for her boss, the agent, to fall in love with your writing, for the agent to convince an editor to fall in love with your writing, for the editor to convince an editorial committee to fall in love with your writing, and for the publishing house’s marketing department to convince readers to fall in love with your writing.

So omitting the SASE isn’t just a technical gaffe; it’s the catalyst in a tragic tale of lost love.

That’s the writer’s opportunity cost of neglecting to include a SASE in a query packet, but there are costs on the agency end as well. Think about it: having the SASE arrive in the same envelope with the query means that Millicent can grab either a form-letter rejection or please-send-us-pages note (oh, didn’t you realize that both were boilerplates?) the very instant after she makes up her mind which is appropriate.

It takes very little time, and the writers themselves are providing the resources for their own rejection. What’s not for the agency to like?

In fact, they like it so much that that most agencies have standing policies against accepting SASE-free queries at all. Providing an envelope and a stamp to reject a single forgetful writer may seem like a negligible expense — but multiply it by the 800-1500 queries the average agency receives every week, and we’re talking about a considerable investment in writers whose work they have already decided not to represent.

So if you didn’t hear back on that last raft of queries — you know, the ones where you glibly told Millicent to contact you via e-mail if she wanted to see pages — that’s probably why.

Yes, in answer to what half of you just thought so loudly, answering your mailed query via e-mail would have been costly for the agency, too, although obviously, not as costly as hauling an envelope from the supply cabinet and donating a stamp to your ongoing quest to be published. The Millicent charged with opening all of those envelopes and scanning the paper queries would have to stop what she was doing, carry your query — and only yours — to a computer, open the agency’s e-mail server, type a rejection (which would probably be identical to the form letter she’s been stuffing in SASEs all day), hit SEND, then head back to that waist-high pile of queries that came in last week.

Multiply that effort by every querier who thinks he’s being clever, considerate, and/or paper-saving by making a cavalier suggestion to contact him by e-mail, and it would add up to a lot of unnecessarily expended energy over the course of a year. Far, far cheaper for the agency just to tell its Millicents to toss any query unaccompanied by a SASE into the recycling bin.

Although if she does decide to ask for pages, she will probably let you know via e-mail, rather than by sending a reply in the SASE you so thoughtfully provided. I like to think of this as the SASE Utility Paradox: the rejected writer must pay for the postage and envelope that carry the bad news; the accepted writer must offer the stamp and envelope as a sacrifice to the gods of querying.

Either way, you’re going to be buying some envelopes and stamps. (Don’t forget to keep receipts; if you file a Schedule C for your writing business, you may be able to deduct these costs as promotional expenses. Talk to a tax expert with experience handling writers’ returns — which I am not –before you deduct anything, however, because the IRS rules governing writers are, I am told, both strange and different than those applicable to other kinds of artist.)

Believe it or not, part of the SASE’s original purpose was not just to save agencies the cost of postage, but to render the querying and submission processes cheaper for the writer: it was substantially less expensive than if the agencies sent back manuscripts with postage due. (Which used to be the alternative, by the way.) It was also intended to preserve copyright by allowing the writer ostensible control about whose grimy paws were on the manuscript when.

Writers tend to forget this in the cyber age, when huge chunks of writing can be transferred from one end of the planet to the other with the simple push of a button (yes, of course I know that the world is not as flat as that image implies. Don’t quibble at me now; I’m on a roll), but technically, in order to prove copyright over unpublished writing, the writer needs to know at all times where all the extant copies are, saying who can and cannot read it. Writing I post on this blog, for instance, is under my control, since I dictate where people can view it; I could disable RSS feeds, if I wanted. (Oh, the power! The power!) If I sent the same posts out via e-mail, they could end up anywhere, forwarded far beyond my knowledge.

That’s why, in case any of you had been wondering, writing posted online is technically published. It makes it easier for writers to prove that they were the original authors of their online work.

The control-who-reads-it doctrine still governs how agencies operate. When you send previously unpublished material off to an agency — to a credible one, anyway — you are operating on the tacit assumption that no one on the other end will reproduce your writing without your permission. You are not, in effect, authorizing them to show it to anyone else until you sign a contract that explicitly grants them the right to do so.

(Which means, by the way, that you should be very wary of an agent who implies, as some have been known to do in order to edge out the competition, that she has already shown submitted materials to an editor as an inducement for you to sign with her. Technically, she cannot market your writing to anyone until you give her explicit permission to do so — but a writer who has just won a literary contest and is juggling manuscript requests from several agents might not be aware of that.)

When you send a SASE with a submission, you are implicitly asserting your right to control where your work is sent next. It conveys an expectation that if the agency rejects it, they will mail the pages back to you, rather than forwarding it to the kind of pirate press that is currently cranking out the 18th, 19th, and 20th installments in the Harry Potter series.

I hear the one in which Harry fights a dragon actually isn’t bad.

As I believe I have mentioned seventeen or eighteen hundred times before, this is a tradition-bound industry; it has historically been slow to change. No matter how good the logic against some of its long-held norms, this one did not change at all until there were some very tangible benefits on the agencies’ end to altering it.

For example, the anthrax scare convinced some agencies to accept e-mailed queries and submissions; prior to that, virtually none of them did. (Some still don’t; double-check before you press SEND.) And the post 9/11 requirement to tote heavy packages to the post office prompted some agencies to start recycling rejected manuscripts, rather than having the lowest intern on the totem pole wheel a paper-loaded dolly up out of the building.

Like so many other aspects of the querying and submission process, at one time, the use of the SASE carried greater benefits to the writer than it does now, but time has hardened courtesies into demands, and habits into traditions. Today, if you do not include a SASE with your submission, you may well be perceived as thumbing your nose at the traditions of people you are trying to impress.

As satisfying as that may be to contemplate, allow me to suggest that it might not be the best way to convince Millicent of your Socratic intellect, encyclopedic knowledge of how publishing works, and lamb-like willingness to take direction. So while my long-standing affection for writers, trees, and the printed pages both work to produce would love to be able to say dispense with the SASE, it would not be in your best interest to fling away the old norms.

I feel as though I should go off and plant a tree now. Or perhaps reread MADAME BOVARY. Instead, I’m going to be intensely practical for a few moments and tell you precisely how to play the SASE game correctly.

When you send a paper query (as opposed to the e-mail variety), tuck a stamped (not metered) envelope addressed to yourself into the envelope. Do this every time, regardless of whether the agency you’re querying actually asks for a SASE on its website or in its blurb in the standard agency guides. It’s expected, whether they say so or not.

If you are sending more than 4 pages of text along with your query — if the agent asked for an author bio, for instance, or a synopsis — make sure that the postage on your query’s SASE is sufficient to get all of those pages back to you. A #10 (business-size) envelope is the norm to accompany queries, and stamps are universally preferred over metered postage.

Since the agency will be popping the returned materials into the nearest mailbox, the stamps you use should be those currently in use in the AGENCY’s country of residence, not yours. This means that if you are submitting to a US-based agency or publishing house from outside the country, you will need to dig up some US stamps. Since foreign post offices often sell these at a considerable mark-up, you can save a lot of money if you buy the stamps directly from the US Postal Service online.

When you send requested materials via mail (again, as opposed to e-mail submissions), include in your submission packet an envelope or box addressed to yourself, along with sufficient postage for the safe return of EVERYTHING you have submitted. (If you want to be really considerate, you may also include a #10 SASE, so the agent may contact you to ask for more pages. This isn’t really necessary, though: in the age of e-mail and relatively inexpensive long-distance calling, that particular request is unlikely to come via regular mail.)

Again, do this every time, regardless of whether the agency (or publishing house) to whom you are submitting has actually asked for a SASE. Omit it only if the agency specifically asks in its guidelines that you not include it. (I know of only one agency that currently makes this request; need I remind you to read each and every agency’s submission guidelines, in case they differ?)

If the requested pages fit in a Manila envelope, it’s perfectly acceptable to fold a second one in half, stamp and address it, and tuck it in the submission packet. If you have been asked to send so many pages that you need to pack ‘em in a box, paper-clip a return mailing label and stamps to your cover letter, along with a polite request that the agent would affix both to the shipping box in the event of rejection.

You HAVE been sending cover letters with your submissions, right? Just sending a manuscript all by itself is considered a bit rude.

Relax, those of you who just clutched your chests: I’ll be talking about how to put together a cover letter for a submission packet as soon as I polish off this series on SASEs. Who knew there were so many different things that needed to go into a submission packet, eh?

Next time, we’ll delve a bit deeper into the practicalities of the e-mailed query, as well as the ins and outs of submission. You wouldn’t want to be caught unprepared if your query is successful, would you?

In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for the Sanitary Author. You wouldn’t want to miss him/her/it, would you? Keep up the good work!

August 28, 2011April 15, 2021 - 1 Comment

Pitchingpalooza, part XXII: and then there’s the finesse part, or, the advantages of lingering on the right track

My apologies for the unexpected mid-series hiatus; I honestly had not anticipated that Pitchingpalooza would carry us into September. (Especially as I have some genuinely juicy treats in store for you over Labor Day weekend.) Blame the muses’ notoriously perverse sense of humor for arranging to have two — count ‘em, two — of my editing clients’ acquiring editors announcing that they were moving on to pastures new last week. Everyone concerned wishes them happy trails, of course, but with a certain amount of trepidation: with any changing of the editorial guard inevitably comes changed expectations for the handed-over manuscript.

Okay, I’m not entirely clear on what that massive collective gasp of horror out there in the ether meant. Were some of you unaware that in recent years, it has become not at all uncommon for the acquiring editor not to remain with the publishing house long enough to see a book she just loved as a submission all the way through the publishing process? Or was the shock — and I suspect it was — that editors will often ask for major changes in manuscripts after they have acquired them, for both fiction and nonfiction?

Oh, I’m sorry; I should have warmed all of you memoirists out there before I sprung that last bit, especially those of you who have been slaving over the Annotated Table of Contents in your book proposals in anticipation of a post-Labor Day submission blitz. I know that you have been working hard, trying to cobble together a plausible and entertaining story arc in a series of chapter summaries — so it may well be dispiriting to hear that it’s far from rare for an acquiring editor, or even an agent offering representation to a nonfiction author, to tell the point-blank that some of those chapters will need to go. Or that others should be added.

Starting to make more sense now that nonfiction is typically sold on a book proposal, not a completed manuscript? While most of the book is theoretical, it’s easier to conceive of changing it.

Yes, even if the writer believes that it is already finished. No matter how complete a memoir or nonfiction book may be in the author’s mind, from a publishing perspective, everything is up for negotiation until it is actually in print and sitting on a bookstore shelf. What is and isn’t finished is the publisher’s call, not the author’s. That assumption pervades the submission stage, and even the pitching/querying stage of a proposal’s progress. From the acquiring editor’s point of view, the proposal is essentially a job application: the writer is making the case that she is the best person currently wandering this terrestrial sphere for the publishing house to hire to write that particular book.

See why I’ve spent this series urging all of you nonfiction writers to spend this series thinking about your platform, and figuring out ways to work it into your pitch?

I sensed all of you novelists relaxing over the course of the last couple of paragraphs, but perhaps you shouldn’t have: agents and editors ask fiction writers to change their manuscripts all the time, too, even absent an editorial changing of the guard. Little things, usually, like whether the ending of the book is dramatically satisfying or whether a complex literary voice constitutes overwriting or is just right.

And while we’re massaging the text, need the protagonist’s sister be gay? Or a deep-sea fisherperson with marked propensities toward disestablishmentarianism?

Oh, you may laugh, but with the high turnover at publishing houses these days, a savvy writer needs to be prepared to be flexible. Just don’t modify your only electronic copy of your original manuscript; it’s not beyond belief that the editor who takes over tomorrow from the person who took over yesterday will like the same things about your book that the acquiring editor did.

Are your heads spinning, campers? Good: you’re in a perfect mindset to think about conference pitching.

After the last couple of Pitchingpalooza posts we talked about how to pull everything we’ve learned throughout this series into a formal 2-minute pitch. Couldn’t you feel the excitement crackling in the air? The moment nearly brought a tear to the eye: the public rejoiced, the heavens opened, lions and lambs lay down together, and agents all over New York spontaneously flung their arms around the nearest aspiring writer, gurgling with joy.

What, you missed all that? Even the good folks cleaning up the ticker tape parade?

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating a trifle. And maybe those of you who aren’t planning to attend a conference and pitch anytime soon didn’t find it all that goosebump-inducing. “Let’s get on with it, Anne,” some nonambulant writers scoffed. “Let’s get back to the type of stuff that writers do at home in the solitude of their lonely studios: writing, rewriting, querying, rewriting some more…”

Patience, scoffers: as I may have mentioned once or twice in the course of this admittedly rather extensive series, learning to pitch is going to make you a better querier. And perhaps even a better writer, at least as far as marketing is concerned.

Did I just hear the scoffers snort derisively again? Allow me to ask a clarifying question, smarty-pantses (astute slacksers?): hands up, every querying veteran out there who now wishes devoutly that s/he had known more about how the publishing industry thinks about books before querying for the first time.

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That’s quite a response. Keep ‘em up if you sent out more than five queries before you figured out what your book’s selling points were.

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Or — sacre bleu! – your book’s category.

That last one is so common that I decided to spare you the artistic representation, so there would still be room on the page for the rest of today’s post. The very idea of querying without knowing makes me cringe: how can you even guess which agents to query before you’ve come up with that?

Which is precisely why it’s a good idea for even writers who would never dream of pitching their books in person to learn how to do it. Not only are many of the same skills required to construct a winning pitch and a successful query letter, but many of the actual building blocks are the same.

Oh, you hadn’t noticed that?

Rest assured, it’s all been part of my evil plan. After Labor Day, we are going to delve once again into the wonderful world of querying. After a few well-deserved treats and perhaps a couple of short forays into craft, of course.

Why wait until after Labor Day, you ask? Long-time readers, chant it with me now: because a hefty hunk of the NYC-based publishing industry goes on vacation from the second week of August through Labor Day. And when they get back, guess what’s piled up high on their already-cluttered desks?

Uh-huh. Might as well hold off until they’ve had a chance to dig through those thousands of piled-up queries.

Trust me, you certainly have time to ponder the mysteries of pitching, glean a few insights, and think about your book’s selling points before our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, will wade her way through the backlog. Heck, you would also have time for a mastoid operation and a trip to the Bahamas; for a good week or two into September, Millie’s going to need be rejecting at a speeded-up clip, just to get through the backlog. Not to mention the thousands of queries that will dumped on her desk just after Labor Day, because so many aspiring writers had heard that they shouldn’t query in August.

I can already feel some of you gearing up to query up a storm that weekend, but honestly, you might want to hold off for a week or two. And whatever you do, do not send an e-mailed query over a long weekend; the probability of getting rejected skyrockets.

Why, you shriek in horror? Millie’s inbox overfloweth on pretty much any Monday, because writers tend to have more time on the weekends. Labor Day weekend is especially popular, because so many of you have been tapping your toes impatiently, waiting for agencies to become populated again. By restraining yourself until, say, Wednesday, your e-mailed query

“But Anne,” I hear some reformed scoffers point out, “why shouldn’t I add my query letter to that pile? Won’t they answer them in the order received?”

Well, more or less. However, Millie’s been known to be a mite grumpy until she has cleared enough desk space to set down her latte. Any guesses what the quickest way to clear a desk of queries is?

Wait until the second week of September. At least.

In the meantime — which is to say: for the next few days — I want to round off Pitchingpalooza with some in-depth discussion of how to navigate a writer’s conference. Yes, yes, I know, we’ve been talking about conferences for the last month, but be fair:: I visit the topic only once per year. It’s been a long visit this time, admittedly, of the type that may well make some of you long for the houseguests to go home, already, but still, I don’t talk about it that often.

Perhaps that’s a mistake, since writers’ conference attendance has been skyrocketing of late. Blame the hesitant economy; writing a book is a lot of people’s fallback position. Interesting, given how few novelists actually make a living at it, but hey, a dream’s a dream.

Literary conferences can be pretty hard to navigate your first time around — and that’s unfortunate, because the darned things tend not to be inexpensive. Like pitching and querying, there are some secret handshakes that enable some aspiring writers to hobnob more effectively than others, as well as norms of behavior that may seem downright perplexing to the first-time attendee.

Up to and including the fact that there’s more to getting the most out of a conference than just showing up, or even showing up and pitching. So I’m going to be talking about the nuts and bolts of conference attendance, with an eye to helping you not only pitch more successfully, but also take advantage of the often amazing array of resources available to aspiring writers at a good conference.

Not to mention feeling more comfortable in your skin while you’re there.

Last week, I brought up a couple of the more common conceptual stumbling-blocks writers tend to encounter while prepping their elevator speeches and formal pitches. The first and most virulent, of course, is coming to terms with the necessity of marketing one’s writing at all — in other words, to begin to think of it not just as one’s baby, but as a product you’re trying to sell.

Half of you just tensed up, didn’t you?

I’m not all that surprised. From an artistic perspective, the only criterion for whether an agent or editor picks up a manuscript should be the quality of the writing, followed distantly by the inherent interest of the story. For many writers, the burning question of whether a market for the book already demonstrably exists doesn’t even crop up during the composition process; they write because they are writers — and writers write.

Is anyone but me sick of that well-worn tautology, by the way? Is it actually any more profound than saying that spelunkers explore caves, or that orchard-tenders have been known to pick the occasional apple?

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but books do not get published simply because someone has taken the trouble to write them — or even because they are well-written. An aspiring writer must make the case that her book is not only a great yarn, but one that will fit into the current book market neatly. And, as many a pitcher and querier knows to her sorrow, she will need to make that case before anyone in the industry be willing to take a gander at the actual writing.

I know, I know: it seems backwards. But as I believe I have mentioned approximately 1704 times before, I did not set up the prevailing conditions for writers; I merely try to cast them in comprehensible terms for all of you.

If I ran the universe — which, annoyingly, I still don’t, as nearly as I can tell — writers would be able to skip the pitch-and-query stage entirely, simply submitting the manuscripts directly with no marketing materials, to allow the writing to speak for itself. Every submitter would receive thoughtful, helpful, generous-minded feedback, too, and enchanted cows would wander the streets freely, giving chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk to anyone who wanted it — or soy milk to the lactose-intolerant. I might even spring for wandering pixies wielding juicers, to bring orange, mango, and kale juice to a neighborhood near you.

Being omniscient, I would also naturally be able to tell you why the industry is set up this way. I’d be so in the know that I could explain why Nobel Prize winner José Saramago was so hostile to the conventions of punctuation that he wrote an entire novel, SEEING, without a single correctly punctuated piece of dialogue. And I would be able to issue all of you well-meaning aspiring writers who think unpunctuated dialogue looks nifty on the page a blanket pardon, so Millicent would not be allowed to reject you on the grounds that you evidently don’t know how to punctuate dialogue.

I would be that generous a universe-ruler.

But I do not, alas, run the universe, so Señor Saramago and certain aspects of the publishing industry are likely to remain mysteries eternal. (What harm would it have done him to use a period at the end of a sentence occasionally? Or a question mark at the end of a question?)

Long-time readers, chant it with me now: no matter how talented you are, if you hope to get published, the marketing step is a necessity. Even if you were Stephen King, William Shakespeare, and Madame de Staël rolled into one, in the current writers’ market, you would still need to approach many, many agents and/or editors to find the right match for your work — and your work would stand a much, much better chance if you talk about it in the language of the industry.

That’s true, incidentally, even if you approach an agent whose submission guidelines ask writers to send pages along with the initial query, instead of by special request afterward (as used to be universal). If the marketing approach is not professionally crafted, chances are slim that those pages will even get read.

Oh, there you go, gasping again, but honestly, this is a simple matter of logistics. Remember, a good agency typically receives somewhere between 800 and 1500 queries per week. If Millicent isn’t wowed by the letter, she simply doesn’t have time to cast her eyes over those 5 or 10 or 50 pages the agency’s website said that you could send.

That’s not being mean. That’s trying to get through all of those queries without working too much overtime.

Unfortunately, the imperative to save time usually also dictates form-letter rejections that the querier entirely in the dark about whether the rejection trigger was in the query or the pages. (Speaking of realistic expectations, please tell me that you didn’t waste even thirty seconds of YOUR precious time trying to read actual content into it didn’t grab me, I just didn’t fall in love with it, it doesn’t meet our needs that this time, or any of the other standard rejection generalities. By definition, one-size-fits-all reasons cannot possibly tell you how to improve your submission.)

All of which is to say: please, I implore you, do not make the very common mistake of believing that not being picked up by the first agent whom you pitch or query means that your work is not marketable. Or of adhering to the even more common but less often spoken belief that if a book were really well written, it would somehow be magically exempted from the marketing process.

It doesn’t, and it isn’t. Unrealistic expectations about the pitching — and querying — process can and do not only routinely make aspiring writers unhappy at conferences the world over, but frequently also prevent good writers from pitching well.

Yes, you read that correctly. Operating on misinformation can genuine hurt a writer, as can a fearful or resentful attitude. Part of learning to pitch — or query — successfully entails accepting the fact that from the industry’s point of view, you are presenting a PRODUCT to be SOLD.

Not, as the vast majority of writers believe, and with good reason, a piece of one’s soul ripped off without anesthesia.

So it is a teeny bit counter-productive to respond — as an astonishingly high percentage of first-time pitchers do — to the expectation that they should be able to talk about their books in market-oriented terms as evidence that they are dealing with Philistines who hate literature.

To clear up any possible confusion for the high-browed: you should, and they don’t.

Why do so many pitchers respond to the pros as though they were evil demons sent to earth for the sole purpose of tormenting the talented and rewarding the illiterate? Selling books is how agents and editors make their livings, after all: they have to be concerned about whether there’s a market for a book they are considering.

They’re not being shallow; they’re being practical.

Okay, most of them are not just being shallow. My point, should you care to know it: a pitching appointment is not the proper venue for trying to change the status quo. Querying or pitching is hard enough to do well without simultaneously decrying the current realities of book publishing.

And yes, in response to that question your brain just shouted, aspiring writers do bring that up in their pitches and queries. All the time. Heck, it’s not all that unusual for a pitcher to mention that the book has been rejected before, and how often.

Don’t emulate their example. Trust me on this one: it’s not going to make your book seem more market-ready to bring up that you’ve already queried it 700 times.

That isn’t just poor strategy — it’s symptomatic of a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes an author successful. Selling is a word that many writers seem to find distasteful when applied to trying to land an agent, as if there were no real distinction between selling one’s work (most of the time, the necessary first step to the world’s reading it) and selling out (which entails a compromise of principle.)

C’mon — you know what I’m talking about; if not, just bring up the issue over a sandwich at your next writers’ conference. This is a real, vitriol-stained topic in writers’ circles.

When aspiring writers speak of marketing amongst themselves, it tends to be with a slight curl of the lip, an incipient sneer, as if the mere fact of signing with an agent or getting a book published would be the final nail in the coffin of artistic integrity. While practically everyone who writes admires at least one or two published authors — all of whom, presumably, have to deal with this issue at one time or another — the prospect of compromising one’s artistic vision haunts many a writer’s nightmares.

That’s a valid fear, I suppose, but allow me to suggest another, less black-and-white possibility: fitting the square peg of one’s book into the round holes of marketing can be an uncomfortable process, but that doesn’t mean it is inherently deadly to artistic integrity. It also doesn’t mean that any writer, no matter how talented, can legitimately expect to be commercially successful without going through that process.

That is not to say there are not plenty of good reasons for writers to resent how the business side of the industry works — there are, and it’s healthy to gripe about them. Resent it all you want privately, or in the company of other writers.

But do not, I beg you, allow that resentment to color the pitch you ultimately give. Or the query letter.

I know, I know: if you’ve been hanging out at conferences for a while, deep-dyed cynicism about the book market can start to sound a whole lot like the lingua franca. One can get a lot of social mileage out of being the battle-scarred submission veteran who tells the new recruits war stories — or the pitcher in the group meeting with an editor who prefaces his comments with, “Well, this probably isn’t the right market for this book concept, but…”

To those who actually work in the industry, complaining about the current market’s artistic paucity will not make you come across as serious about your work — as it tends to do amongst other writers, admittedly. The pros just hear it too often. As a result, such complaints are likely to insult the very people who could help you get beyond the pitching and querying stage.

Yes, you may well gulp. To an agent’s ears, writers who complain about how much harder it is to get one’s work read than even ten years ago — it’s not your imagination — tend to sound, well, naïve. Of course it’s hard to break into the business; simple math dictates that.

“What does your perhaps well-founded critique of how the industry works have to do with whether I want to read your manuscript?” the pros murmur as writers lecture them on how it really should be easier. “I’m sitting right here — wouldn’t this time be better spent telling me what your book is about?”

Besides, neither a pitch meeting nor a query letter is primarily about writing, really. They’re both about convincing agents and editors that here is a story or topic that can sell to a particular target audience.

If your pitch convinces them that your work falls into that category, then they will ask to see pages. Out comes the broken record again:

Contrary to what the vast majority of aspiring writers believe, the goal of the pitch (and the query letter) is not to make the business side of the industry fall in love with your writing, per se — it’s to get the agent or editor to whom it is addressed to ask to see manuscript pages or a proposal.

Then, and only then, is it logically possible for them to fall in love with your prose stylings or vigorous argument. I’ve said it before, and I’ll doubtless say it again: no one in the world can judge your writing without reading it.

This may seem obvious outside the context of a pitching or querying experience, but it’s worth a reminder during conference season. Too many writers walk out of pitching meetings or recycle rejections from queries believing, wrongly, that they’ve just been told that they cannot write. It’s just not true.

But by the same token, a successful verbal pitch or enthusiastically-received query letter is not necessarily a ringing endorsement of writing talent, either. Both are merely the marketing materials intended to prompt a request to see the writing itself.

Which means, of course, that if you flub your pitch, you should not construe that as a reflection of your writing talent, either; logically, it cannot be, unless the agent or editor takes exception to how you construct your verbal sentences.

I know, I know, it doesn’t feel that way at the time, and frankly, the language that agents and editors tend to use at moments like these (“No one is buying X anymore,” or “I could have sold that story ten years ago, but not now”) often does make it sound like a review of your writing. But it isn’t; it can’t be.

All it can be, really, is a statement of belief about current and future conditions on the book market, not the final word about how your book will fare there. Just as with querying, if an agent or editor does not respond to your pitch, just move on to the next prospect on your list.

Does any of that that make you feel better about the prospect of walking into a pitch meeting? Did it at least permit you to get good and annoyed at the necessity of pitching and querying, to allow all of that frustration to escape your system?

Good. Now you’re ready to prep your pitch.

Did I just sense some eye-rolling out there? “But Anne,” I hear some chronically sleep-deprived preppers cry, “can’t you read a calendar? I’ve been working on my pitch for weeks now. I keep tinkering with it; I know I have the perfect pitch in me, but I can’t seem to bring it out.”

I know precisely what you mean. After staring for so long at a single page of text (which is, after all, what a formal pitch ends up being, at most), it can feel like it’s taken over one’s life. As with any revision process, either on one’s own work or others’, one can become a touch myopic, both literally and figuratively.

How myopic, you ask? Let me share an anecdote of the illustrative variety.

A couple of years ago, I went on a week-long writing retreat in another state in order to make a small handful of revisions to a novel of mine. Small stuff, really, but my agent was new to the project (having inherited it when my original agent went on maternity leave) and wanted me to give the work a slightly different spin before he started submitting it. Basically, he wanted it to sound a bit more like his type of book, the kind editors had grown to expect from his submissions. Perfectly legitimate, of course (if it doesn’t sound like that to you, please see both the GETTING GOOD AT ACCEPTING FEEDBACK and HOW TO BE AN AGENT’S DREAM CLIENT categories on the list at right before you even consider getting involved with an agent), and I’m glad to report that the revisions went smoothly.

At the end of my week of intensive revision, a friend and her 6-year-old daughter were kind enough to give me, my computer, and my many empty bottles of mineral water (revision is thirsty work, after all, and the retreat did not offer glass recycling) a ride back from my far-flung retreat site. Early in the drive, my friend missed a turn, and made a not entirely flattering reference to her Maker.

Nothing truly soul-blistering, mind you, just a little light taking of the Lord’s name in vain. Fresh from vacation Bible school, her daughter pointed out, correctly, that her mother had just broken a commandment and should be ashamed of herself. (Apparently, her school hadn’t yet gotten to the one about honoring thy father and thy mother.)

“Not if God wasn’t capitalized,” I said without thinking. “If it’s a lower-case g, she could have been referring to any god. Apollo, for example, or Zeus. For all we know, they may kind of like being berated in moments of crisis. It could make them feel important.”

Now, that was a pretty literal response, and one that generated a certain amount of chagrin when the little girl repeated it in her next Sunday school class. Not that I wasn’t technically correct, of course, but I should have let the situation determine what is an appropriate response. Sometimes, you just have to go with the flow.

That’s true in pitching, too. Hyper-literalism can cause quite a bit of unnecessary stress during conference prep. In part, that’s the nature of the beast: since aspiring writers are not told nearly enough about what to expect from a pitching appointment (or a potential response to a query), they tend to grasp desperately at what few guidelines they are given, following them to the letter.

To a certain extent, that makes perfect sense: when going into an unfamiliar, stressful situation, it’s natural to want to cling to rules. The trouble, as I have pointed out throughout this series, is that not everything writers are told about pitching, querying, or even — dare I say it? — what does and doesn’t sell in writing is applicable to their individual situations, or even up-to-date. Adhering too closely to the wrong rules can be a serious liability.

Anyone who has ever attended a writers’ conference has seen the result: the causalities of hyper-literalism abound.

Since not all of you are nodding sagely, allow let me take you on a guided tour: there’s the writer who lost precious hours of sleep last night because her prepared pitch is four sentences long, instead of three; there’s the one who despairs because he’s been told that he should not read his pitch, but memorize it, but stress has turned his brain into Swiss cheese. The guy over here is working so many dashes, commas, and semicolons into his three-sentence pitch that it goes on for six minutes — but has only three periods. In another corner mopes the romance writer who has just heard an agent say that she’s not looking for Highland romances anymore; naturally, the writer hears this as no one is looking to acquire your kind of book any more.

You get the picture. As writers listen to litanies of what they are doing wrong, and swap secrets they have learned elsewhere, the atmosphere becomes palpably heavy with depression.

By the end of the conference, the truisms all of these individuals have shared will have bounced around, mutating like the messages in the children’s game of Telephone. That, combined with days on end of every word each attending agent, editor, and/or teacher utters being treated with the reverence of Gospel, there is generally a whole lot of rule-mongering going on. And if a writer has a sound analytical mind, he is apt to notice that a heck of a lot of those rules are mutually contradictory.

Take a nice, deep breath. The industry is not trying to trick you. What it is trying to do is get you to adhere to under-advertised publishing norms. While some of those norms are indeed inflexible — the rigors of standard manuscript format, for instance — most of the time, you will be fine if you adhere to the spirit of the norm, rather than its letter.

So those of you who are freaking out about a few extra words in your elevator speech: don’t. It needs to be short, but it is far better to take an extra ten seconds to tell your story well than to cut it so short that you tell it badly. No agent or editor in the world is going to be standing over you while you pitch, abacus in hand, ready to shout at you to stop once you reach 101 words in a hallway pitch, any more than she will be counting its periods.

Admittedly, they may begin to get restive if you go on too long — but in conversation, length is not measured in number of words or frequency of punctuation. It is measured in the passage of time.

Let me repeat that, because I think some pitchers’ concerns on the subject are based in a misunderstanding born of the ubiquity of the three-sentence pitch: the purpose of keeping the elevator speech to 3-4 sentences is not because there is some special virtue in that number of sentences, but to make sure that the elevator speech is short enough that you could conceivably blurt it out in 30-45 seconds.

Thus the term. The elevator speech should be sufficiently brief to leave your lips comprehensibly between the time the elevator shuts on you and the agent of your dreams on the ground floor and when it opens again on the second floor.

Remember, though, that no matter what you may have heard, an elevator speech is not a formal pitch but a curtailed version of it. The elevator speech, hallway pitch, and pitch proper are primarily differentiated by the length of time required to say them.

So if you feel the urge to be nit-picky, put that energy to good use: it actually makes far more sense to time your pitch than it does to count the words. Try to keep your elevator speech under 45 seconds, your hallway pitch to roughly 60 — 75 seconds max, and your pitch proper to 2 minutes or so.

But do not, I beg you, rend your hair in the midnight hours between now and your next pitching opportunity trying to figure out how to cut your pitch from 2 minutes, 15 seconds down to 2, or plump it up from a minute seventeen to 2, just because I advise that as a target length.

I’m not going to be standing there with a stopwatch, any more than an agent is. And until I rule the universe, I can pretty much guarantee that no agent or editor, even my own, is ever going to say, “Well, that WOULD have been a great pitch, but unfortunately, it was 17.4 seconds longer than Anne Mini says it should be, so I’m going to have to pass.”

Even if I did rule the universe (will someone get on that, please?), no one would ever say that to you. It’s in your best interest to adhere to the spirit of my advice on the pitch — or anyone else’s — not necessarily the letter.

How might one go about doing that? Well, remember that elevator speech I wrote a couple of weeks ago for PRIDE AND PREJUDICE?

19th-century 19-year-old Elizabeth Bennet has a whole host of problems: a socially inattentive father, an endlessly chattering mother, a sister who spouts aphorisms as she pounds deafeningly on the piano, two other sisters who swoon whenever an Army officer walks into the room, and her own quick tongue, any one of which might deprive Elizabeth or her lovely older sister Jane of the rich husband necessary to save them from being thrown out of their house when their father dies. When wealthy humanity-lover Mr. Bingley and disdainful Mr. Darcy rent a nearby manor house, Elizabeth’s mother goes crazy with matchmaking fever, jeopardizing Jane’s romance with Bingley and insisting that Elizabeth marry the first man who proposes to her, her unctuous cousin Mr. Collins, a clergyman who has known her for less than a week. After the family’s reputation is ruined by her youngest sister’s seduction by a dashing army officer, can Elizabeth make her way in the adult world, holding true to her principles and marrying the man she passionately loves, or will her family’s prejudices doom her and Jane to an impecunious and regretful spinsterhood?

Because I love you people, I went back and timed how long it would take me to say: sixty- two seconds, counting gestures and vocal inflections that I would consider necessary for an effective performance. That’s perfectly fine, for either a hallway speech or pitch proper. Actually, for a pitch proper, I would go ahead and add another sentence or two of glowing detail.

To be fair, though, it is a bit long for an elevator speech, if I intended to include any of the magic first hundred words as well. If I had just spent a weekend prowling the halls, buttonholing agents for informal hallway pitches, I would have tried to shear off ten seconds or so, so I could add at the beginning that the book is women’s fiction and the title.

Oh, and to have the time to indicate that my parents loved me enough to give me a name, and manners enough to share it with people when I first meet them. But seriously, I would not lose any sleep over those extra ten seconds, if I were pinched for time. Nor should you.

Brevity is not, however, the only virtue a pitch should have, any more than every single-page letter in the world is automatically a stellar query. If you’re marketing a novel, you need to demonstrate two things: that this is a good story, and that you are a good storyteller. Similarly, if you are pitching a NF book, you need to show in your pitch that this is a compelling topic, and that you are the world’s best-equipped person to write about it.

As any good storyteller can tell you, compelling storytelling lies largely in the scintillating details. I have been listening to writers’ pitches for significantly longer than I have been giving them myself — in addition to my adult professional experience, I also spent part of my wayward youth trailing a rather well-known author around to SF conventions; aspiring writers were perpetually leaping out from behind comic books and gaming tables to tell him about their book — so I can tell you with authority: far more pitches fail due to being full of generalities than because they have an extra fifteen seconds’ worth of fascinating details.

Embrace the spirit of brevity, not the letter. If you must add an extra second or two in order to bring in a particularly striking visual image, or to mention a plot point that in your opinion makes your book totally unlike anything else out there, go ahead and do it.

Revel in this being the one and only time that any professional editor will ever tell you this: try not to be too anal-retentive about adhering to pre-set guidelines. It will only make you tense.

As the song says, keep those spirits high, pulses low. Oh, and keep up the good work!

August 11, 2011January 19, 2017 - 11 Comments

Pitchingpalooza, part XVII: there are boundaries, and there are BOUNDARIES

oath-of-the-horatii

Before I launch into Pitchingpalooza’s much-anticipated step-by-step guide to approaching a real, live agent to ask if you may pitch without an appointment, would everyone please stand and salute? Today may not be a national holiday in the country at large, but here at Author! Author!, it could hardly be more important.

As of today, I have been writing this blog for six years. That’s 1,442 posts, about 5,000 questions, and so many thousands of pages of text that I actually don’t have time right now to sit down and tote them up.

The publishing world has changed quite a bit over that period, has it not? Back when we first began confabbing about the life literary, aspiring writers would complain about the necessity of promote their work to agents; published writers would grumble about the imperative to show up for readings and book signings scheduled by their publishing houses. Pretty much everyone on the writing side of the equation was vaguely disgruntled about having to put in that level of effort, or at least the fact that a first-time author’s advance no longer enabled her to take any serious time off work to make requested revisions. One might, if one was lucky, be able to purchase a used car, but unless one happened to toss off a surprise bestseller, small-but-serious authors often did not quit their day jobs until their fourth or fifth book was doing rather well.

At the time, we writers liked to get together and bemoan how much harder it was to get published and have one’s books sell well than it had been a dozen years before. Those concerns seem almost quaint now, don’t they?

In the interim, we’ve all watched in hushed anticipation as the publishing industry has been declared dead, not just once, but over and over again. Not since the advent of television had so many prophesied so much literary doom so often. Forget the fact that used book sales actually went up during this period, e-books have taken off, U.S. self-publishing releases have risen to three times the annual rate of traditional publishing (which, contrary to popular opinion, has hovered around a quarter of a million releases per year), and the increase in library patronage has almost exactly matched the decline in the new book sales market. As of 2008, we were all told, the world simply stopped reading.

Poppycock. If you look at even new book sales in the U.S. today, they are up in every major category. The book market is expanding. People haven’t stopped reading, bless their literature-loving hearts; they are simply doing it in different venues and in different formats.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we’re necessarily going to see a reversal in all or even any of the shifts in how writers are expected to relate to their books. Now, aspiring writer not only need to market themselves in an ever-more-competitive agent-seeking market, but first-time authors also frequently end up as their books’ primary pusher to the reading public at large. It’s common for an editor to tell the author of a newly-acquired to ramp up her web presence on her own, and pronto; authors often schedule their own book signings, as budgets for book tours have dried up. This, at a juncture when the average advance on a first novel often is not enough to purchase a new laptop upon which to write the second.

As editing staffs at the major publishers have dwindled, it has become commonplace for the acquiring editor not to follow the book all the way through publication, and for the new sheriff in town to want to take the book in a different direction; I’m constantly hearing from authors flabbergasted at learning that their book has just fallen into the hands of its fourth or fifth editor. Editorial staffs are more crunched for time, too, as are agencies. In the face of less hands-on support and greater competition for readers’ attention, many authors now chooses to bring in book docs like me to help whip their manuscripts into shape before plopping them into the print queue.

And because we writers are so devoted to seeing our words in print, as a group, we have done all of this largely without complaining (well, at least in front of company), during a period when we have seen advances for celebrity memoir and established bestselling novelists skyrocket, but advances for first novels drop precipitously. It’s not our imagination; it genuinely is harder than it used to be, by quite a bit.

Yet if the members of the Author! Author! community have groused about anything, it has tended to be about manners. And who could blame you? Six years ago, most first-time submitters considered it rude if their submissions were rejected by form letters at the end of two-month reading periods. I used to field incredulous comments from writers who had not yet heard back a couple of weeks after sending out queries. Three weeks used to be standard for exclusives.

Today, we barely blink at agency websites that announce up front that they will not respond at all to queries if the answer is no. Six- to eight-month turn-around times are the norm now, even if the writer grants an exclusive, and it’s not unheard-of for a writer to be left wondering nine or ten months after sending off requested materials if the manuscript is still being considered, has been rejected without notice (as is increasingly common), or just didn’t arrive in the first place.

These have been a hard six years to be a writer, but still, I have tried to remain upbeat through it all. There have been times — and now that they are behind me, I can admit this with impunity — when ambient conditions have been so bad that I have felt a trifle guilty for continuing to be your practical-minded cheerleader, urging you to keep moving forward down the path to publication. There have been weeks when I simply couldn’t bring myself to look at the lists of new book acquisitions, because I knew I would find so few first-time authors there. I had moments, days, and even months when, as I boldly answered questions about whether it is okay to contact an agent who has had your manuscript for four months to ask what’s going on (it isn’t) or whether a writer can submit adult fiction to the major publishing houses directly (you can’t) or whether it was still possible to land a first novel that didn’t include a supernatural element (it has always been, but sometimes just barely), I wondered bleakly if I should be advising you instead to rush out and become a celebrity in another field, so that you could get a book published in your chosen one.

And let’s not even talk about the many, many dark nights of the soul where I bearded heaven with my bootless cries of, “Why do I seem to be the only writing guru talking about standard format, when there actually is only one way to present a manuscript properly to a U.S. agent? And why are my mother and I apparently the only people in the nation who still wince when writers mix up farther and further, much less to, too, and two?” It’s important to have standards: surely, I felt, there must still be at least a small cadre of us who believe that the distinction between imply and infer should be recognized and maintained by all right-thinking people, even though it’s difficult even to remember now the literary outrage in the 1980s when newscasters first began using impact as a verb.

When did feeling this way stop being the norm amongst writers? I did not start out with ambitions to be a literary radical. But now that I’ve been besmirched (or honored, depending upon how one chooses to look at it) with the moniker, there’s something else I’ve been dying to get off my chest: real vampires do not sparkle.

Under any circumstances, really. Refraction requires the ability to reflect light, so a beastie who cannot admire himself in a mirror will in all probability have a hard time bouncing those light particles back at easily-dazzled virgins. Especially if he is prone to bursting into flames the instant a stray shaft of sunlight hits him.

I’m just saying. If a writer decides to present the world with a physically-limited being, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that writer to respect those boundaries.

These have indeed been trying times to be literate. Let’s hear it for all of us for hanging in there, scrambling to bolster the printed page’s apparently crumbling plaster ceiling while the same types of Chicken Littles who had placed the written word on the critical list sometime in the middle of the Boer War have run around screaming that the entire building is about to crash to the street. But people are still reading. And good writers are still producing great books.

I like to think that we here at Author! Author! have done our small part in perpetuating that. Three cheers for persistence!

That’s enough frivolity for one day, I think. Let’s get back to work.

This pitch-preparing series been a long road, hasn’t it? And not an easy one: I’ve been blithely asking each and every one of you to knuckle down and take your own work seriously enough to learn to talk about it in the language of the publishing industry. I’m aware that it’s been hard, intensive work, both time- and emotion-consuming.

But trust me: all of this effort will feel very worthwhile indeed ten minutes before your first scheduled pitch meeting. Or thirty-two seconds into your first hallway pitch.

Feeling positively faint at the prospect of the either, particularly the latter? Don’t worry; more timorous souls than you have braved the hallway pitch and survived it. Oh, they may not have enjoyed it while it was going on, but I’ve never yet had a pitching student keel over at the moment of truth.

Honest. I wouldn’t put you through the pain of creating an elevator speech unless I were very confident that you’d actually be able to put it to some use.

And yet, I feel as though I have been discussing elevator speeches — those 3-4 line gambits for use in informal pitching situations, as opposed to the 2-minute pitch reserved for formal appointments and other actual sit-down conversations — so intensely over the past few post that I may be inducing a phobia of lifts in my readers. (Not the shoes, the elevators.)

So I’m going to take out my magic wand and relieve you of a bit of that tension.

As of this moment, you have my permission to get into an elevator with an agent or editor without pitching, if you so desire. Live long and prosper.

Feel better? Good. In return, I am going to ask something else of you. Here and now, raise your dominant writing hand (or both of ‘em, if you work primarily on a keyboard) and repeat after me:

I hereby solemnly swear that I shall not have learned the magic first hundred words and elevator speech in vain. The next time I attend a writers’ conference, I will pitch to at least three agents or editors with whom I do not have a previously-scheduled appointment.

I’m going to hold you to that, you know. Oh, and you can put your hand(s) down now.

Why did I foist such a dreadful oath upon you? Because I know from experience that the only thing better than walking out of a conference with a request to send pages to an agent you like is walking out with 5 requests to send pages to agents you like.

Is that not a good enough reason for some of you? Okay, here’s an even better one: I’ve heard from no less than seven members of the Author! Author! community that at a certain local literary conference that shall remain nameless, every single available agent appointment was booked. That meant that those attendees who were mistakenly assigned to meet with agents who did not represent their book categories were simply out of luck.

Too bad; come back next year and try again. You weren’t in a hurry to find an agent for your work or anything, were you?

In instances like this, the only other alternative is hallway pitching. So even if you think that you will never, ever, EVER be able to work up the nerve to buttonhole the agent of your dreams outside of a pre-arranged meeting, I strongly recommend coming up with a plausible hallway pitch.

You just never know when you’re going to need it, do you? But even if you never (knock on wood) find yourself in the unenviable position of not being able to pitch formally at a conference whose main selling point is pitching appointments, a savvy writer honestly does need to be aware of her own book’s selling points and how to market them.

Why, you ask? Well, in this economy and the current publishing market — see above — it’s actually not all that astonishing that the Conference That Shall Remain Nameless’ appointments sold out. Writing a book is a LOT of people’s Plan B, after all. Predictably, that fact translates into higher writers’ conference attendance in slow economic times, a greater volume of queries and submissions arriving at well-established agencies, and, ultimately, significantly heightened competition for both agents and publishing contracts.

Sorry to depress you, but one of the reasons you keep visiting Author! Author! because you know I won’t whitewash the truth just because it’s unattractive, right?

So let’s take arms against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, shall we? Let’s talk about how to instigate a hallway pitch.

I just felt you tense up, but relax. You already have in your writer’s tool bag all of the elements you need for a successful hallway pitch — or, indeed, an informal pitch in virtually any social situation.

Did that one creep up on you? I swear, it’s true:

MAGIC FIRST 100 WORDS + ELEVATOR SPEECH = HALLWAY PITCH.

Ta da! It honestly is that simple.

You thought I was talking at random when I made you promise that at the next conference you attended, you would pitch to at least three agents or editors with whom you do NOT have a pre-arranged appointment, didn’t you? Well, gotcha: I already knew that you the skills to do it.

How did I know? Well, we’ve been working hard for weeks on your toolkit. We’ve gone over how to narrow down your book’s category, identify your target market, as well as coming up with graceful ways of letting an agent know how big that audience might be, brainstorm selling points for your book,) and a platform for you, and construct a snappy keynote statement. We’ve seen how to introduce ourselves and our work with the magic first 100 words, as well as how to tease the premise with the elevator speech. Not only that, but we’ve also wrested some of the most basic fears most writers harbor about pitching out from under that space under the bed that they share with the bogeyman and dealt with ‘em as they came up.

So you have all of the requisite tools. All that you need to add to that mix is the guts to walk up to an agent who represents your type of book, smile, and begin:

salesman

“Hi, I’m (YOUR NAME), and I write (BOOK CATEGORY). My latest project, (TITLE), is geared toward (TARGET MARKET). See how it grabs you: (KEYNOTE).” Wait for encouraging look, nod, or ask if it’s okay to continue. “(ELEVATOR SPEECH).”

I’m not saying that working up the guts to do this is easy; it certainly isn’t, especially the first time. But if you watch the flow of bodies at conferences, as I do, you will notice something: except for when the agents and editors are in assigned locations — on a dais, teaching a class, in pitching appointments — or socializing amongst themselves, they have two states of social being: swamped and alone.

With virtually no significant chunk of time that cannot legitimately be categorized as one or the other.

Sit in a corner and watch — you’ll see that I’m right. In social situations, there will always be many, many more writers giving an agent or editor a wide berth, in order to avoid the possibility of having to give a hallway pitch, than walking up and saying hello. For this reason, it’s often easier than one might think to engage an agent or editor’s attention at a conference.

Especially if the people in question happen to smoke. At any literary shindig thrown within the continental United States, the designated smokers’ area outside the hotel or conference center will be positively swarming with agents looking for a light. Be there to offer it to them, strike up a conversation along with the match — and then, after a discreet interval, ask if they would be willing to spare a moment or two to hear your 30-second pitch.

As with any alone-phase approach, the key is to be unobtrusive and polite. Ask before you pitch, and always give the agent the opportunity to say she’s too tired or busy to hear a pitch right now. You can always offer to meet her later in the conference, if another time is better for her.

Your mother was right, you know: good manners are the best calling card.

Don’t be shy; you’re prepared for this now. Just walk right up to ‘em. Remember, they come to the conference in order to meet writers — writers, in fact, provide their bread and butter on a daily basis.

Actually, it’s not uncommon for an agent or editor not to know anyone at a conference, other than other agents and editors. If the agent of your dreams is standing alone, waiting for his turn in the coffee line, he may not mind at all if you introduce yourself. He might, believe it or not, actually be grateful.

(He will mind, however, if you pursue this line of logic in the bathroom, the swimming pool, the sauna, the shower in the hotel’s gym, or anyplace else that finding oneself barricaded in a small space with a stranger might be a tad, well, uncomfortable. Trust me on this one; there’s a fine line between persistent and creepy.)

Public venues are safer: hallways, seminar rooms, and banquet halls, especially just after the keynote speaker has signed off for the night. Agents tend to get swamped in those places, true, but at least you don’t need to worry about whether you’re imposing.

Another fringe benefit to choosing one of the more conventional venues: the approach is typically easier. Heck, if you choose to walk up to an agent immediately after the agents’ forum, you may even be able to stand in line with other would-be informal pitchers. In fact, if it’s your first time giving a hallway pitch, I would recommend going and standing in one of those let-me-talk-to-you line.

That way, you can watch others in action before you jump in yourself.

Where would I recommend you try after that? Moments when a formal presentation is giving way to whatever is scheduled next tend to be rife with informal pitching opportunities. Between the morning’s last seminar and the rubber chicken luncheon, for instance, or immediately after the dinner’s speaker has reclaimed her seat. Or during the break in a seminar the agent happens to be teaching, just before it starts or right after it ends.

Another popular choice: remember that bar I keep mentioning, the one that is reliably a hundred yards or less from any writers’ conference? Guess where the pros — agents, editors, authors in town to promote their books, local authors seeking companionship amongst their own kind, vampires savvy enough to realize that if they want to talk literature, it would behoove them to track down those who love to chat about it late into the night — tend to hang out in their spare moments?

Suppose that’s a good place to find pitching prospects?

One very important caveat about bar or party pitching: if an agent or editor is already engrossed in social conversation in said bar, it is considered a trifle rude to interrupt that conversation so you can give your hallway pitch. The accepted method is to act as though this were any other party, introducing yourself and chatting until someone asks you, “So, Georgette, what do you write?”

Yes, that IS the invitation you think it is. Grab it.

Don’t equivocate, as so many aspiring writers do, by sighing and giving an evasive or 20-minute answer. Instead, smile and answer like the professional writer that you are:

“I write (BOOK CATEGORY). My latest project, (TITLE), is geared toward (TARGET MARKET). See how it grabs you: (KEYNOTE). Would you like to hear more? Yes? (ELEVATOR SPEECH).”

After you have said all this, though, both etiquette and strategy dictate that you do one thing more. Chant it with me now, campers: stop talking.

Most hallway pitchers — at least, the ones who muster the nerve to go through with it — get so excited that they have absolutely no idea when to shut up. Don’t let nervousness prompt you to keep chattering. This is a social situation, after all, not a pitch appointment: if the agent or editor who asked what you write is intrigued, trust me, she’ll ask you to continue. Or, if you really hit the pitch out of the park, she’ll hand you a card and ask you to send pages.

If she does neither, don’t push. Treat it like any other business interaction that hasn’t gone as you would like: smile, thank the agent for her time, and retreat.

The same rules apply to the bar and the smokers’ area, by the way. These are public spaces, true, but they are also designated as relaxation places, rather than places of business. If the agent of your dreams is disinclined to shop talk, you are honor-bound to honor that preference. (Oh, and if you plan to pitch in the bar, keeping the refreshments light on the alcohol is an excellent idea. I usually settle for club soda and lime — the better to keep my wits about me, my dear.)

Regardless of the locale you pick for your informal speech, stick to the script. That way, you will know for a fact that you’re not rambling on endlessly.

I’m not kidding about this. Other than serving as a reliable, professional-sounding introduction for yourself and your work, this formula for a hallway pitch has another benefit: if you put it together properly, you will not have to waste precious seconds of informal pitching time checking your watch.

The hallway pitch is self-timing, you see. With advance preparation and practice, you should be able to say all of it comprehensibly within 30 – 45 seconds, certainly a short enough time that you need not feel guilty about turning to the agent next to you in the dinner line, or walking up to her after that interminable class on nonfiction proposals, and asking if she can spare a minute to hear your pitch.

To set your conscience at ease, we’re not talking about a big imposition here: if you follow the guidelines above, you will be taking up less than a minute of her time. So you may feel professional, not intrusive, by giving your hallway pitch immediately after saying, “Please pass the rolls.”

I had I mentioned that you should always ask first to make sure it’s okay, right?

Oh, and because hallway pitches are almost invariably delivered standing, do me a favor: just before you start speaking, bend your knees a little. No need to do a deep, ballerina-style plié; just soften those joints. Pitching with locked knees can make a person get light-headed. Which means that she can faint.

Don’t think about it too much; it will only give you nightmares. As should a vampire that sparkles, but I guess there’s no accounting for taste.

The hallway pitch and its constituent parts are tools of the trade, nothing more. It’s up to you to use them effectively and appropriately. How? Well, as many benefits as a pre-prepared hallway pitch offers for interacting with agents and editors, the elevator speech also gives you a concise, professional follow-up after ANYONE you meet at a conference responds to your magic first hundred words with, “Wow. Tell me more.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Don’t be afraid to give your hallway speech to other writers at the conference — it’s great practice, and it is absolutely the best way imaginable to meet other people who write what you do.

Other than starting a blog, of course. Conservatively, I’d estimate that in the last six years, it’s been the medium of my meeting in the neighborhood of 15,000 writers at various stages of their careers. Not reaching that many readers, mind you — my statistics have been stronger than that — but making actual personal connections.

Top that, sparkle boy.

The elevator speech has other uses as well. It makes a stellar describe-your-book paragraph in your query letter. There, too, you will be incorporating the elements of the magic first hundred words — minus the “Hi, my name is” part, they make a terrific opening paragraph for a query.

We have, in short, been pulling together a complex set of implements for your writer’s tool bag. A hammer is not going to be the right tool for a job that requires a screwdriver, but that doesn’t mean that a hammer doesn’t have a heck of a lot of uses.

All of which is a nice way of saying: while you might not want to give everyone you see at a conference a 5-minute pitch, you could conceivably work the magic first hundred words into any conversation. But now that you have the tools to make a hallway pitch, get out there and do it!

But let the agent finish her drink, for heaven’s sake. She’s only just gotten rid of that pesky vampire.

Happy sixth anniversary, campers, and keep up the good work!

March 21, 2011 - No Comments

Bursting the boundaries: Author! Author! Rings True freestyle category winners John Turley and Fiona Maddock

John, author of Macondo 20/20

Fiona, author of Infinite Loop

Welcome to the second group of winning entries in the Author! Author! Rings True literary competition. Today, I am delighted to be bringing you the extremely interesting top entries Category III: fiction that could legitimately fit into several book categories, John Turley and Fiona Maddock. Well done, both!

As shall be the case with those who carried off top honors in each of the Rings True categories, I shall be discussing page 1 and a synopsis with Heidi Durrow, author of the recent literary fiction debut, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, now available in paperback. Heidi was generous enough to help me critique these intriguing pages.

We shall be approaching today’s winners slightly differently than our last set, however. Because the author’s personality (or, more accurately, public persona plus platform) is part of what is being pitched in memoir, we began the previous prize post with each winner’s bio, then moved on to her first page and synopsis. With fiction, however, the writer’s platform is significantly less important at the querying and submission stages — or, to put it as bluntly as our old pal Millicent the agency screener might, all the charm in the world won’t make up for a story that doesn’t grab her on page 1.

As they say in the biz, what matters is the writing. Oh, and the query’s being aimed at an agent or editor with a solid track record of handling books in that manuscript’s book category.

Why? Chant it with me now, long-time readers of this blog: since no agent represents every kind of book, it’s a waste of time to query those who do not habitually handle books like yours. Queries addressed to agents who do not represent the book category in question get rejected automatically; pervasive writerly fantasy to the contrary, Millicent will not make an exception for a submission that happens to be well-written. Therefore, selecting the appropriate category for your manuscript is vital.

As the gargantuan wail of writerly angst can attest, many, if not most, aspiring writers find this imperative a tad stressful. “What if I get it wrong?” they fret, and who can blame them? “I hate the idea of my work being pigeonholed.”

While this attitude is completely understandable, it also represents a fairly complete lack of comprehension for how books are marketed. All books currently published in the United States have been pigeonholed — that’s how the hardworking employees of Barnes & Noble and other brick-and-mortar bookstores know where to shelve them. It’s also how book buyers for those stores look for what to stock, how book distributors describe their current offerings, how publishers think of their lists, and how editors’ job descriptions limit what they can acquire. It thus follows as night the day that if agents want to pitch books, they must also adhere to the prevailing practice of assigning each client’s projects to already-established book categories.

Which is to say: a book category is nothing but a conceptual container, intended to help a manuscript end up on the desk of someone who can actually bring it to publication. Basically, these categories exist to save everyone time and effort, including the writer.

Still don’t believe me? All right, let’s take a gander at today’s category-defying entries. Image that you are sitting in Millicent’s desk chair: if you want to recommend these manuscripts to your boss, the agent, you will need to be able to tell her in a sentence or two what each book is about. You will also have to assign it to a category.

Everyone clear on the brief? Excellent. First, here is the first page of John Turley’s MACONDO 20-20. Ready, set, screen!

How did you do? Were you able to categorize it? Or — and I hope this is the case, given how much attention we’ve devoted in recent weeks to learning to spot small problems on manuscript pages — were you too distracted by these details to focus on book category?

On the off chance that some of you were not as distracted by them as Millicent would have been, here’s that first page again with the formatting, punctuation, and word use problems corrected. Notice how much correcting these minuscule matters changes how it reads.

Amazing what a difference those small revisions make, is it not? Now, we may return to our initial question: how would Millicent categorize this book?

If you’re having some trouble, step back and ask yourself an even more basic question: based on this page alone, is this book fiction or nonfiction?

Oh, you may laugh, but you would be surprised at how often it’s not possible to tell from an opening page — or how frequently queriers leave this pertinent fact out of their queries. But since there is no such thing in the publishing world as a book that’s sort of fiction, sort of nonfiction, it’s honestly not in a writer’s interest to make Millicent guess which a manuscript is.

Of course, I already know which, because I have John’s synopsis sitting in front of me. Before we get to it, however, let’s keep our nit-picking hats on and peruse Fiona Maddock’s entry. Much to Millicent’s relief, it’s substantially simpler to categorize — or is it?

If you found your focus shifting from questions of category, spelling, and even writing almost immediately, congratulations: you’re starting to read like a pro. (And if you instantly noted the missing slug line, you’re reading like Millicent.)

If not — which would be quite understandable in this case; it’s one heck of an opening — here’s that page again as a professional reader would have preferred to see it, so you may compare formatting and punctuation directly.

If you did not catch the problems the first time around, do not despair — you’re not only like the overwhelming majority of submitters, but very much like the general reading public. These days, we’re also used to the pervasive typos brought on by the rise in on-screen editing that small things like using dashes correctly or adding commas where they are necessary may well seem like piddling details, unworthy of contemplation.

To those who love literature and have devoted their lives to its publications, however, these seemingly small gaffes are far from irrelevant. In these days of dwindling staffs, prose-polishing is the writer’s responsibility, an essential part of the job description. These manuscript faux pas are also important because to a professional’s eye, they indicate that the author is either too busy to proofread her own work between revisions or just isn’t very attentive to detail.

Either way, the Millicent can predict pretty confidently from page 1 that the rest of the manuscript will contain similar problems — and thus that this writer would be more time-consuming (and therefore expensive) to represent than others with similarly compelling stories and talent. They know from long experience that if a writer does not consistently produce clean manuscripts, some luckless soul at the agency and/or publishing house will have to invest valuable hours in polishing the prose.

They also tend to suspect that a submitter who has not invested the time in learning the rules of standard format — which, lest we forget, people in the publishing world believe to be so pervasive that a writer would have to be deliberately avoiding in order not to apprehend them — is going to have difficulty following directions from an agent or editor. So while forgetting (or, more commonly, not being aware) that standard format requires a space at either end of a dash, or that dashes in manuscripts should be doubled, or that each page needs a slug line may be easy for an aspiring writer to overlook, to Millicent, it’s all part of the diagnosis of the submission.

I’m bringing this up not to chide today’s winners, but because I couldn’t resist the object lesson: even when the writing and the premise is this good, presentation matters. Please, for your book’s sake, don’t ever assume that a professional reader is going to cut your manuscript slack because s/he likes the writing or considers the subject matter intriguing.

Speaking of diagnosis and subject matter, how have you been coming with your categorization projects? Let’s turn to our winners’ 1-page synopses and bios to see if they offer any clues.

Ah, a forest of hands just shot into the air out there. “But Anne,” those who were paying close attention at the beginning of this post protest, and rightly so. “You said that for fiction, the writer’s platform does not matter nearly so much as for nonfiction. I don’t expect that every police procedural to be written by a police officer, any more than I would expect a middle-grade novel about an undersea soccer league to be penned by a mermaid. So why would a fiction-screening Millicent glance at a bio at all until her agency had already decided to pick up a client, much less after reading only the first page of a submission?”

You’re probably right, oh attentive ones — generally speaking, even a professional reader who really loves a fiction manuscript will not read the bio until fairly late in the game. After Millie has finished the submission, she might well scan the bio for additional selling points to mention to her boss. (“This safari novel is great — and the writer once had three toes bitten off by a lion!”)

In the case of John’s manuscript, any expertise he might have in offshore drilling or marine biology might well render his take on a certain recent oil spill more credible for readers. That’s going to be especially true if the book is nonfiction, but because any major event in the news is likely to generate a few novels, an extensive background in the subject matter would help set his book apart from the rest.

Then, too, our goal here is to establish these books’ respective categories, right? Although most of you have probably made an educated guess that Fiona’s book category would fall into the fiction range, from her first page alone, it’s also possible that she’s written a memoir about being a plastic surgery survivor.

The suspense is killing me. Let’s take a gander at her synopsis and bio.

Fiona Maddock is a self-taught artist and writer. She’s a secret scribbler and a closet geek. She’s travelled across Europe, India and round the world. She’s tinkered around with web sites and built on-line art galleries for her work. In 2010, she graduated from the University of Reading with a BSc in Information Technology and this experience inspired her to write science fiction. She lives in Reading, United Kingdom and spends her time on her fiction writing, blogging and supporting disabled students at uni. Contact her through her blog, Novel Thinking.

Eureka! Although she’s just come out and told us what her chosen book category is in her bio — an unusual choice, and one that I think is an inefficient use of page space in what is already a rather information-light bio by U.S. standards — actually, the synopsis renders it perfectly clear. There’s no reason to hesitate for even a moment in assigning this book permanently to the science fiction category.

I have to confess, it always strikes me as a trifle apologetic when writers insist upon including the information that they are self-taught in their bios — or queries, where that fact pops up with astonishing frequency. It’s a statement guaranteed to perplex Millicent: the vast majority of published writers were self-taught; while an M.F.A. in writing makes for some nice ECQLC (Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy), and thus might render Millicent a trifle more likely to ask to see pages, it won’t help necessarily help a submission’s chances. The knowledge that a writer taught herself the ropes, however, isn’t unusual enough to strike Millicent one way or the other. Besides, to a pro, the mere fact that the bio mentions no writing credentials implies that the writer has not had any formal training.

That’s mere quibbling, however, over a quite exciting first page and synopsis — and a sultry authorial voice that draws the reader into the story, pronto. Here’s what Heidi and I had to say about them.

While Fiona’s synopsis is still fresh in our collective mind, I’d like to flag a very, very common Millicents’ pet peeve: placing words and phrases within quotation marks that are not actually quotes. Remember, professional readers are paid to be hyper-literal: if words are presented within quotation marks, they will expect that either (a) those words are dialogue, (b) the words within the quotes are intended ironically, in a manner that casts doubt on the aptness of the moniker, or (c) the words within quotes are the title of a short story. Thus, while “Hi, Stan,” or she was wearing a “Chanel” suit would not cause our Millie’s eyebrows to elevate, the fact that one of the characters’ names is consistently presented within quotation marks would send them rocketing into her hairline. That’s especially likely to happen with this synopsis, as Fiona has used UK-proper single quotation marks, rather than US-proper doubled ones. (Also, when quoted words end a sentence, the period belongs within the quotation marks, not outside.) As we have been discussing in the comments lately, while UK and Canadian formatting and spelling are perfectly correct for manuscripts being submitted in those countries, a US-based Millicent will expect every manuscript she sees to be in American English. (Unless, of course, what she’s seeing is about to be reprinted domestically after successful publication elsewhere in the English-speaking world.) Why? Chant it with me now, those of you who paid close attention above: in the current literary market, the writer, not agent, is generally held to be responsible for proofreading the manuscript. If Millicent approves a submission, but the pages of a story not set in the UK and intended for publication in the US do not adhere consistently to prevailing US standards, some luckless individual will have to make all of those tiny changes individually. I’m bringing this up not merely because many, many UK-based science fiction and fantasy writers query New York-based agents every year — it’s a significantly stronger market here, one that supports quite a few more agents — but also because I’d rather like to be able to buy Fiona’s book over here someday. And here, the little things often do make the vital difference in a submission. Let’s move on to John’s synopsis and bio. Intriguingly, they render the question of book category even more complex than what we were facing on page 1. <a href="/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Turley-synopsis.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Turley-synopsis.jpg" alt="" title="John Turley Macondo synopsis" width="466" height="603" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-14616"/></a> <blockquote> <a href="/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/JAT-Photo-for-BIO.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/JAT-Photo-for-BIO-150x150.jpg" alt="" title="John Turley author photo" width="75" height="75" class="aligncenter size-thumbnail wp-image-14593"/></a>John Turley grew up in San Diego, California, loving rocks and the sea. Advanced degrees in petroleum engineering and ocean engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and the University of Miami preceded a three-year professorship and propelled him into the world of offshore drilling. His drilling-management responsibilities with a major oil-and-gas company began with the Gulf of Mexico, evolved to the North Sea, were bolstered by Harvard Business School, and culminated with management of worldwide drilling. He elected to retire early as an officer of the company to focus on writing. In his second career, Turley writes novel-length fiction and short stories. In 2008, he won Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ prestigious Colorado Gold award for his mystery Body Shots (think of Carl Hiaasen’s Skinny Dip, but the sharks win). He describes his recently completed novel, Macondo 20-20, as a facts-based, on-the-rig, character-driven story about the Gulf of Mexico well that became the infamous BP blowout. The Turleys live in Littleton, Colorado. On a lake. By a lot of rocks. </blockquote> Eureka again! John does in fact have precisely the credentials to induce either a nonfiction- or fiction-representing agency’s Millicent to leap squealing from her desk chair and go running into her boss’ office, exclaiming, “This guy is going to be a GREAT interview! He’s got a wonderful platform for writing about the platform!” But have these additional tidbits cleared up the question of book category? Here’s what Heidi and I had to say on the subject. <iframe loading="lazy" width="500" height="281" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/UyXthmAkY-o?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""/> So have we resolved the question of book category? I’m afraid not, at least not without reading more of the manuscript: as the last line of the synopsis states point-blank, MACONDO 20-20 is a mixture of fiction and narrative nonfiction; unfortunately, in the current literary market, there is no book category for such a mix. Fiction is fiction, nonfiction nonfiction, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Now, of course, we’ve all seen books that are in fact made up of both fiction and nonfiction; during the height of the narrative nonfiction craze, such hybrids were rather common, often labeled as based on a true story to save the author a few legal headaches. Part of the definitional problem with hybrids lies outside the publishing world. To the average person, nonfiction is true and fiction is false, period: thus the huge scandal when James Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES turned out to contain a few fictionalized episodes. To those who write, represent, and edit books, however, the line between fiction and nonfiction can be far less clear: we all know novelists who import real-life incidents virtually wholesale into works of fiction, as well as nonfiction writers who tweak reality in order to make it a slightly better story. Heck, I know an exceedingly well-established short story author/essayist who says she never knows for sure whether her latest work is fiction or nonfiction until her agent sells it to an editor. Who promptly labels it as either fiction or nonfiction. The prevailing logic is that the public simply doesn’t like ambiguity. I wonder about that, since creative nonfiction remains so popular. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, creative nonfiction is the practice of using fiction-writing techniques to write a true story. The usual examples are Truman Capote’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Blood-Truman-Capote/dp/0375507906/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300777134&sr=1-1">IN COLD BLOOD</a> (or the lesser-known but to my mind more interesting short piece “Hand-Carved Coffins” in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Music-Chameleons-Truman-Capote/dp/0679745661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1300777286&sr=1-1">MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS</a>, John Berendt’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Midnight-Garden-Good-Evil-Savannah/dp/0679763317/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300777176&sr=1-3">MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL</a>, and most of the opus of Tom Wolfe. The writer essentially sticks to the truth, typically backing it up with massive research, but rather than maintaining a journalistic narrative distance from the subject matter, the narrative places the reader in the moment, as in a novel. Depending upon the current mix of fiction and nonfiction in John’s manuscript, narrative nonfiction might therefore be an excellent choice — especially if the manuscript is not yet completed. Narrative nonfiction, like other nonfiction, is typically sold not on a full manuscript, but via book proposal. (If you’re curious about how much work that would be, John, you might want to skim through the HOW TO WRITE A BOOK PROPOSAL category on the archive list located on the lower right-hand side of this page.) However, the synopsis makes it pretty clear that the book as it stands is fiction. That’s potentially great news, too: this is a fantastic premise for a thriller, and he’s already got the pacing down cold. Thriller expectations would dictate keeping any political message pretty subtle, however. John could still pull upon his experience to lend insight and credibility to the narrative, but he would not be speaking as an expert per se. It all depends upon what he wants this intriguing book to achieve — and how he wants to make his mark as a writer. Heidi and I could not resist speculating a little. While I was at it, I introduced her to Millicent. <iframe loading="lazy" width="500" height="281" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/aCYjepAmfpg?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""/> The scope of the story, then, is the decisive factor here. Which side of the fiction/nonfiction fence John ultimately chooses — whether to label it narrative nonfiction and follow real-life characters (which would make the best use of his credentials, and thus probably be easier to sell) or a thriller set within real events (which I suspect is closer to the manuscript he currently has in hand — will determine how the synopsis would need to be revised. As compelling as the story told in the synopsis is, its jumble of fiction and nonfiction is just too likely to leave Millicent wondering, “So where would this book sit in a bookstore?” How are fiction and nonfiction synopses different, you ask? Well, a synopsis for a novel tells its story directly, as a story. It introduces the protagonist(s), their environment, and the challenges they face. In a nonfiction synopsis, on the other hand, sets up the central premise or argument of the book, makes it clear to the reader what is at stake, and establishes the writer’s platform. In a novel synopsis, it’s usually not very effective to review the book or talk about it in analytical terms — or, to borrow Millicent’s term for a synopsis that professes to analyze the book in question, high school term paper. Phrases like the reader follows… or review-like qualitative statements about the book merely distance the reader from the story being told. Why is distance a problem in a fiction synopsis? Part of its point of a fiction synopsis is to show not just the plot’s many twists, but to demonstrate that the writer is a good storyteller. That’s a lot harder to pull off if the reader is told about the characters in summary terms (Antigone is brave, resilient, and doomed.) than if the characters are revealed — yes, even in a synopsis as short as a page — through their actions (Torn between conflicting family loyalties, Antigone defies her uncle and secretly buries her slaughtered brothers.) Nor is it considered proper to discuss the writer’s platform in a novel’s synopsis, for the same reason that a novelist’s author bio is not typically read until late in the game: for fiction, expert credentials matter less. By presenting a novel in the terms Millicent would expect to see used to describe nonfiction, both professional readers eager to read fiction and those seeking nonfiction on this topic are likely to be confused. Again, a copse of raised hands has arisen in the ether. “Um, Anne? Am I alone in finding it rather ironic that you should be devoting so much of the prize post for Category III: fiction that could legitimately fit into several book categories to trying to nailing down book categories for John and Fiona? Couldn’t we just, you know, revel in their books’ not fitting into pre-defined molds?” Well, we could, irony-lovers, but frankly, I would rather see these two talented writers sailing over the many hurdles between finished manuscript and publication as quickly and easily as possible. Not committing to a book category generally stretches out the agent-seeking process, for the exceedingly simple reason that it’s far, far harder to track down agents who represent your kind of book if you don’t know what agents would call your kind of book. It also tends to drag out the process if you do know, but are unwilling to narrow your agent search to the one or two categories that best fit your book. Embracing many categories may render it easier to compile a long list of agents to query, but sadly, there’s no submission less painful to reject than one that does not fit comfortably into an agent’s category preferences. Yes, no matter how wonderful the book in question may be. Remember, Millicent is under orders. Even if a miscategorized submission causes her to exclaim, “Oh, the writing here is nice, and the premise intriguing,” she has been trained to add regretfully, “but my boss doesn’t represent this kind of book. Next!” Fiona and John’s first pages are too good to deserve such a fate. Choosing an apt book category is the first step toward successful querying and submission, enabling the writer to focus upon both the norms of that part of the literary market and why the book will appeal to those readers. Best of luck in the search, John and Fiona, and again, many thanks to Heidi Durrow for her trenchant analysis. Keep your eyes peeled for those vital small details, everybody, and keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-4058" class="post-4058 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-after-youve-been-rejected category-annes-favorite-posts category-dealing-with-fear-of-rejection category-dealing-with-readers-reactions-to-ones-books category-dealing-with-rejection category-is-it-ok-to-submit-to-several-agents-at-once category-keeping-the-faith category-overnight-shipping-requested-materials category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-realistic-expectations-for-submitters category-realistic-expectations-for-writers category-submission-fatigue category-writing-advice-truisms"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/02/09/just-what-am-i-getting-myself-into-part-ix-good-news-less-good-news-and-why-you-should-keep-the-faith-or-go-fish-3/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2011-02-09T00:00:00+00:00">February 9, 2011</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/02/09/just-what-am-i-getting-myself-into-part-ix-good-news-less-good-news-and-why-you-should-keep-the-faith-or-go-fish-3/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/#comments">12 Comments on Just what am I getting myself into? Part IX: good news, less-good news, and why you should keep the faith, or, go fish!</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/02/09/just-what-am-i-getting-myself-into-part-ix-good-news-less-good-news-and-why-you-should-keep-the-faith-or-go-fish-3/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark">Just what am I getting myself into? Part IX: good news, less-good news, and why you should keep the faith, or, go fish!</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <a href="/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/fish-in-bowl.JPG"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/fish-in-bowl-1024x766.jpg" alt="" title="fish in bowl" width="512" height="383" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-9571"/></a> Before we launch into today’s post, I have some good news and some less-good news to announce. No, make that fantastic and all-too-real news. First, the phenomenal: please join me in a gigantic round of cheering for long-time Author! Author! reader <a href="http://misterkristoff.wordpress.com/">Jay Kristoff</a>, who had just landed a three-book deal with St. Martin’s/Tor UK for his STORMDANCER, a dystopian fantasy set in steampunk feudal Japan. Congratulations, Jay! It just goes to show you: it can be done, people. Keep those chins high as you press forward. Jay’s book sold at auction, and, good community member that he is, he has posted <a href="http://misterkristoff.wordpress.com/">a really interesting account of it on his blog</a>. How’s that for timely, since we’ve spent the last few weeks focusing upon how books move from manuscript to publication? Speaking of which — and moving on to the less-good news — as those of you who check in here regularly may have noticed, I have been posting rather spottily for the last couple of weeks. That’s been due to a combination of positive (my niece’s wedding is next week) and less-positive factors (those pesky post-car crash injuries have been acting up again). Sensing a pattern here? In an effort to save myself my now-habitual daily guilt when I do not post, as well as to save faithful readers a few minutes on those days, I’m going to take the next week off from posting. After I’ve finished throwing rice at relatives, I shall return, in theory refreshed. Or, at the very least, with a bit more time on my hands. So do enjoy yourselves between now and the 17th. How about investing the time you would have spent reading my blog in sending out a couple of extra queries, or in doing a spot of revision on that manuscript? Just a suggestion. On to the topic of the moment — which, as it happens, has everything to do with the ups and downs of a writing career. That, and predictability. I freely admit it: I’m perpetually astonished at the things that are supposed to flabbergast otherwise reasonable adults. That characters on television shows who have been flirting for seven consecutive seasons suddenly end up romantically entangled during episodes aired during sweeps week, for instance: um, who precisely is not going to have seen that coming? Or that any major political initiative is greeted by anything but the unanimous approval of any given legislative body: as nearly as I can tell from the news every night, we’re all supposed to be floored by the fact that politicians disagree with one another from time to time, even when those splits run along precisely the party lines that characterized the last 17 major disagreements. Or that anyone’s cockles wouldn’t be warmed by the magic of Christmas. Frankly, I like to think that people are a trifle less credulous than that — and more inclined to learn from experience. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, I don’t think too much of people who are not wiser today than they were yesterday. Which is one aspect of how the publishing industry treats writers that I really like: it assumes not only that anyone who can write well enough to deserve to be published is an intelligent human being, but also that a good writer can and will learn the ropes of the business side of publishing. In this era where even news shows operate on the assumption that the average adult has the attention span of a three-year-old — and one who has been stuffing candy into his eager mouth for the last two hours at that — I find agents’ and editors’ presumption of authorial intelligence rather refreshing. Unfortunately, most aspiring writers see only the negative fallout of this industry-wide assumption; since the pros expect writers to do their own research before trying to get their books published, those brand-new to the biz are often stunned that nobody in the industry spontaneously tells them what to do. Which is completely understandable, right? From a first-time querier’s perspective, it can seem downright counterproductive that agents just expect her to know what a query letter should look like, what information it should contain, and that it shouldn’t just read like a back jacket blurb for the book. Heck, how is someone who has never met an agented author in person to know not just to pick up the phone and call the agent in question? Magic? Osmosis? Similarly, agents, editors, and contest judges presume that anyone genuinely serious about her writing will have taken the time to learn how professional writers format their manuscripts — an interesting presumption, given that many, if not most, aspiring writers are not aware that professional manuscripts are not supposed to resemble published books. (To those of you who just gasped: you might want to take a barefoot run through our recent <a href="/index_p_13616.html">Formatpalooza series</a>.) Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s not information that the average writer is born knowing. That’s a real shame, since professionally-formatted manuscripts tend to be taken far more seriously at submission time than those that are not. Why? People who read manuscripts for a living tend to assume that good writers are intelligent human beings, that’s why. From Millicent the agency screener’s perspective, the only reason that a manuscript would not be formatted properly is that the submitter did not bother to do his homework. Why does that matter? Well, a query or submission that does not conform to their expectations of what is publishable (in terms of writing) or marketable (in terms of content or authorial authority) is a sign that the writer just isn’t ready yet to play in the big leagues. In other words, even if the writing is pretty good and/or the book concept pretty engaging, Millicent might toss that fish back into the waters where she caught it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that she believes the writer will never produce professional-level work; indeed, folks in the industry tend to assume (and even say at conferences) that they’re confident that if a truly talented writer gets rejected, she will take it as a sign that she needs to improve her presentation. Since the information on how to do that is available — although nowhere near as readily or conveniently as most agents who say this sort of thing seem to think — why wouldn’t someone with a genuine gift invest the time and effort in learning to do it right? From the writer’s side of the game, there’s a very straightforward answer to that: because the average querier or submitter, gifted or otherwise, doesn’t have a clear idea of what he’s doing wrong. Since most rejection letters these days contain absolutely no clue as to what caused the agent (or, more commonly, the agent’s Millicent) to shove the submission back into the SASE — heck, some agencies no longer respond at all if the answer is no — no one should be particularly surprised if an aspiring writer’s learning curve isn’t always steep. Why bring up the expectation of intelligent research toward the end of this series on how writers bring their books to publication, you ask? Because from an outside perspective, it’s just too easy to interpret the sometimes esoteric and confusing rules of querying, pitching, and submission as essentially hostile to aspiring writers. That’s not really the case, you know. While many of the querying and submission restrictions have indeed been established, as we have discussed, in order to narrow the field of candidates for the very, very few new client slots available at most agencies, the intent behind that weeding-down effort is not to discourage talented-but-inexperienced writers from trying to get their work published. The underlying belief is that an intelligent person’s response to rejection will not be to give up, but to analyze what went wrong, do some research about what can go right, and try, try again. Believe it or not, the fine folks who toil in agencies and publishing houses don’t expect the writers they reject to disappear permanently, at least not the ones with genuine talent. They believe that the gifted ones will return, this time better equipped for life as a professional writer. Go back to your native element, little fish. We’ll see you again when you’re bigger. Understanding this attitude is key to handling rejection with aplomb — or even translating agent-speak into writers’ English. Take, for instance, that old publishing industry truism, good writing will always find a home. What the agents and editors who spout this aphorism seldom think to add is: but not necessarily right away. Like learning any other set of job skills, becoming a professional writer can take some time. Which means, from the business side of the industry’s perspective, writers who give up after just a few rejections — which is the norm, incidentally, not the exception — are those who aren’t seriously interested in making the rather broad leap between a talented person who likes to write and a professional writer in it for the long haul. They don’t waste too many tears over the loss of the former. I don’t see it that way, personally: talking to so many writers over so many years, I see the crushed dreams behind the writer who gives up after a single rejection as clearly as those belonging to the writer who is struggling through year 7 of an agent search. That pain is real. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think that most talented aspiring writers take individual rejections from agents far, far too seriously. Yes, you read that correctly: it’s very easy to overrate the importance of no. These days, it seems as though every other aspiring writer I meet has either: <blockquote> (a) sent out a single query, got rejected, and never tried again, (b) had a few queries rejected two years ago, and has been feverishly revising the manuscript ever since, despite the fact that no agent had yet seen it, (c) pitched successfully at a conference, but convinced himself that the only reason four agents asked to see his first chapter was because those agents were just saying yes to everybody, (d) received a positive response to a query or pitch, then talked herself out of sending the requested materials at all, because her work isn’t good enough, (e) sent out the requested pages, but in order to save himself from disappointment, decided in advance that none of the replies will be positive, (f) received the first manuscript rejection — and expanded it mentally into a resounding NO! from everyone in the industry, and/or (g) concluded from conference chatter that no one in the industry is interested in any book that isn’t an obvious bestseller. </blockquote> In short, each of these types of writers had decided that his or her fears about what happened were true, rather than doing the research to find out whether the response that fear and hurt dictated was in fact the most reasonable one. Don’t believe me? Just look how easily each of the conclusions above can be debunked: <blockquote> (a) A single query is not — and cannot — be indicative of how every agent on earth will respond. A better response: why not try again? (b) Until agents have actually seen the manuscript, there’s no way a writer can know how they will respond to it. A better response: work on improving the query, then try again. (c) No, the agents and editors were not asking everyone to send chapters — pitching doesn’t work that way. A better response: assume that you did something right and send out the requested materials. (d) How do you know for sure until you send it out? A better response: learn how to present your work professionally, then submit it. (e) In my experience, foretelling doom does not soften future misfortune, if it comes — it only serves to stultify present hope. A better response: hedge your bets by continuing to query other agents while waiting to hear back from the first round. (f) ANY agent or editor’s opinion of a book is just that, an opinion. A better response: see (a) (g) the publishing industry makes most of its money on books that are neither bestsellers nor small-run books. Most of the time, the mid-list titles are paying the agency’s mortgage. A better response: take the time to learn how the industry works, rather than killing your chances entirely by not continuing to try. </blockquote> None of this is to say that bouncing back from rejection is easy, or that landing an agent is a snap. The road from first idea to publication is long and bumpy, and seems to get bumpier all the time. As Maya Angelou tells us, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.” Yes, it’s emotionally hard work to prep your pages to head out the door to agents and editors; yes, it is hard to wait for replies to your submissions. To give you a foretaste of what’s down the road, it’s also psychically difficult to watch the weeks tick by between when you sign with an agent and when that sterling soul decides that, in her professional opinion, the time is ripe for her to submit your book to editors. And then it’s rough to wait until those editors get around to reading it, just as it is agonizing to hang around, feigning patience, between the time a publisher acquires your book and it appears on the shelves. I’m not going to lie to you: it’s all incredibly wearing on the nerves. That being said, if you are thinking about throwing in the towel on your book before you have given the querying and submission processes a thorough test, please do not look to me for validation of that decision. I’ll give you practical advice on how to query; I’ll hand you tips on how to improve your submission’s chances; I’ll share pointers on the fine art of revision; I’ll answer your questions along the way. I will cheer from the sidelines until I’m blue in the face for your efforts as a writer. As long as you keep trying. As Jay’s triumph clearly illustrates, aspiring writers are still landing agents — as he did fairly recently — and selling first books. But not if they give up. One of the few industry truisms that is true 100% of the time: the only book that has ABSOLUTELY no chance of being published is the one that stays hidden in the bottom drawer of the author’s filing cabinet. Keep pushing forward; keep sending your work out. Because while it’s time-consuming, expensive, and emotionally wearing, it’s also literally the only way that your book — or any book — comes to publication. Long-time readers of this blog will groan with recognition, but once again, I feel compelled to remind you that five of the best-selling books of the 20th century were rejected by more than a dozen publishers before they were picked up by publishers — and that was back in the days when it was considerably easier to get published. Everybody count down with me now: <blockquote> Dr. Seuss, AND TO THINK THAT I SAW IT ON MULBERRY STREET (rejected by 23 publishers) Richard Hooker, M*A*S*H (21) Thor Heyerdahl, KON-TIKI (20) Richard Bach, JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL (18) Patrick Dennis, AUNTIE MAME (17) </blockquote> The lesson to derive here: keep moving forward. Please, please, PLEASE don’t dismiss your book too soon, on the basis of some preconceived notion of what will and will not sell — even if that preconceived notion fell from the ostensibly learned lips of the agent of your dreams. Concentrate on what you can control, not what you can’t. In order to do that effectively, you’re going to need to learn about how the process actually works. That’s the less-good news. The good news is that the writer does have practically absolute control over the technical and cosmetic aspects of the submission. Yes, I know — for most of us, getting our thoughts, stories, and worldviews out there is the primary goal of writing a book, so concentrating on the details seems comparatively mundane. Applying and adhering to the rules of standard format is not a joy for anybody; when the aspiring writer first embraces it, it can seem like a necessary evil. Most of us want to move directly to unfettered self-expression — and then are surprised and frustrated when the resulting book has difficulty finding an agent, getting published, or winning contests. But this is a bad idea, both professionally and emotionally. Concentrating almost exclusively on the self-expressive capacity of the book, we tend to read rejection as personal, rather than as what it is: an industry insider’s assessment of whether she can sell your work within her preexisting sales network. Ask anyone in the biz, and he will tell you: 99% of rejections are technically-based; the rejection usually isn’t of the submitter’s style or worldview, for the simple reason that those are not considerations unless the basic signs of good writing — in the sense of professional writing — are in the submission. This can be a very empowering realization. As can coming to terms with the fact that while people may be born with writing talent, the ability to present writing professionally is a learned skill. Once a writer grasps the difference between technically good writing and stylistic good writing and the distinction between a well-written manuscript and a professionally-formatted one, rejections become less a personal insult than a signal that there may be technical problems with how she is presenting her writing. The lesson to be learned from a rejection transforms from, “Why do they hate me?” to “What can I do to make this submission/query read better?” Yes, yes, I know: emotionally speaking, it’s not much of an improvement, at least in the short term. But when the question is framed in the latter manner, there is something the writer can do about it. I’m a big fan of tackling the doable first, and getting to the impossible later. Without a doubt, absolutely the best thing you can do to increase your chances is to make sure that your submission is crystal-clear and professionally formatted before you send it out. Out comes the broken record again: pass it under other eyes, preferably those of other writers, people who both know basic good writing when they see it AND have some idea how to fix it. Does that giant gasp that just rent the ether mean that some of you had not thought of your first readers that way? Had you simply handed your manuscript to your nearest and dearest, or even to just anybody who asked to see it? As understandable as the impulse to share the product of your creative labors is, this practice is not likely to help you get your work published. Why? Longtime readers of this blog, chant with me now: as marvelous as your kith and kin may be as human beings, they are unlikely to give you unbiased feedback — and only unbiased, knowledgeable feedback is going to help hoist your work up over the professional bar. What else can you control, even a little? Well, you can avoid sending your query or submission during the traditional industry dead times (between the second week of August and Labor Day; between Thanksgiving and New Year’s day), or predictable periods of heavy submission (immediately after New Year’s, right after school gets out for the summer). You don’t want to have your work end up in the read when we get around to it pile, do you? So for heaven’s sake, don’t forget to take a great big marker and write REQUESTED MATERIALS on the outside of your envelope, so your marvelous submission doesn’t get tossed into the unsolicited manuscript pile for a few months. It’s a good idea, too, to mention that these are requested materials in your HUGELY POLITE cover letter that you enclose with the manuscript: Thank you for asking to see the first three chapters of my novel… While I’m being governessy, I might as well add: always, always include a SASE — a stamped, self-addressed envelope – with enough postage (stamps, not metered) for your manuscript’s safe return. In fact, you might want to mention the SASE in your cover letter. This marks you as a courteous writer who will be easy to work with and a joy to help. If you want to move your reputation up into the peachy range, include a business-size SASE as well, to render it a snap to ask you to see the rest of the manuscript. Make it as easy as possible for them to reach you to say that they love your book. And no, green-minded aspiring writers: asking them to recycle your submission if they do not like it is no substitute for an appropriately-sized SASE. Sorry. In the first place — hold on to your hats here, because this is a genuine shocker by local standards — most of the offices in the industry do not even have recycling bins. (I know; it’s appalling, when you think about how much paper they see in a day.) And in the second place, they’ll just think you’re being rude. Sorry again. One last thing, another golden oldie from my broken-record collection: do not overnight your manuscript; priority mail, or even regular mail, is fine. This is true, even if the agent who has your first chapter calls or e-mails you and asks for the rest of the manuscript immediately. It’s neither appropriate nor necessary to waste your precious resources on overnight shipping. Trust me on this one: you may be the next John Grisham, but honey, it is unlikely that the agent’s office is holding its collective breath, doing nothing until it receives your manuscript. Hurrying on your end will not speed their reaction time. Another way to keep your momentum going while you wait: since turn-around times tend to be long (a safe bet is to double what the agent tells you; call or e-mail after that, for they may have genuinely lost your manuscript), do not stop sending out queries just because you have an agent looking at your chapters or your book proposal. If an agent turns you down — perish the thought! — you will be much, much happier if you have other options already in motion. Hey, not every fisherman agrees on what size of fish to throw back. The only circumstance under which you should not continue querying is if the agent has asked for an exclusive look at your manuscript — which, incidentally, you are under no obligation to grant. However, politeness generally dictates agreement. If you do agree to an exclusive (here comes another golden oldie), specify in advance for how long you are granting it. Three months is more than generous. Then, if the agent does not get back to you within the stated time, you will be well within your rights to keep searching while she tries to free enough time from her kids, her spouse, her Rottweiler, etc. to read your submission. Don’t let the hobgoblins of self-doubt carry you off, my friends. Have faith in your writing — and work hard to learn as much as you can to maximize your book’s chances of success. Enjoy your week off, everybody. Keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-1651" class="post-1651 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-after-you-have-queried-or-pitched category-agents category-approaching-agents-online-or-by-e-mail category-dealing-with-fear-of-rejection category-e-mailing-queries category-how-can-i-tell-if-an-agent-is-reputable category-how-will-i-know-if-my-pitch-did-work category-industry-etiquette category-keeping-the-faith category-must-reads category-realistic-expectations-for-pitchers category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-realistic-expectations-for-writers category-rejection-when-they-dont-tell-you-at-all category-what-an-agent-will-expect-a-new-client-to-know-about-the-publishing-industry-a-crash-course"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/25/just-what-am-i-getting-myself-into-part-v-theyre-not-going-to-be-mean-to-me-are-they/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/approaching-agents-online-or-by-e-mail/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2011-01-25T00:00:00+00:00">January 25, 2011</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/25/just-what-am-i-getting-myself-into-part-v-theyre-not-going-to-be-mean-to-me-are-they/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/approaching-agents-online-or-by-e-mail/#comments">12 Comments on Just what am I getting myself into? Part V: they’re not going to be mean to me, are they?</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/25/just-what-am-i-getting-myself-into-part-v-theyre-not-going-to-be-mean-to-me-are-they/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/approaching-agents-online-or-by-e-mail/" rel="bookmark">Just what am I getting myself into? Part V: they’re not going to be mean to me, are they?</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <a href="/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/kangaroo-boxing.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/kangaroo-boxing.jpg" alt="" title="kangaroo-boxing" width="387" height="341" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-9033"/></a> Does that high-pitched twanging I hear out there in the ether mean that subtitle struck a chord with some of you? Yes, yes, I know: for those of you who are gearing up to query for the first time — or working up nerve to start querying again after having been rejected, steeling yourselves to submit requested materials, or girding your emotional loins to head on out and give a verbal pitch — the question of how a real, live agent might respond to your polite little request can assume nightmare proportions. How did I know about those middle-of-the-night tremors, you ask? A lifelong association with that peculiar species, the domestic writer, that’s how; we excel ourselves in psyching ourselves out. Who is better than a writer for fleshing out the contours of a vague fear into a mind-numbing horror story, after all? Especially if one tends, as so many aspiring writers do, to view any individual agent not as a human being, full of personal quirks and individual tastes, but as Everyagent, a powerful soul whose singular opinion might as well be taken for speaking for an entire industry’s opinion on any given query, submission, or pitch. If your dreams have been haunted by Everyagent, I have some good news for you: s/he doesn’t actually exist. Agents are individuals — often charming ones — with unique tastes, each of whom specializes in certain limited areas of the publishing industry. Although not all of them are graced with equally polished manners (especially if approached rudely or unprofessionally), the overwhelming majority do not take umbrage when approached by an aspiring writer with a project that does not interest them. At worst, most of them will just say no, and that will be that. Again, what makes me so sure? One very, very simple reason: being nasty about it would take up too much of their busy days. Due to the incredibly high volume of queries the average agent receives, investing the time in a personalized mean response to even 10% would suck up hours that could be spent selling their clients’ books. Or reading current and prospective clients’ submissions. Or even, you know, having a life. Oh, you smile, but you’re feeling better already, are you not? The same holds true for pitching, incidentally — and that cheering you hear is the masses pacing the floors of their studios until they wear paths in their carpets as they ponder the perfect pitch. Yes, it’s terrifying to walk into a meeting with a real, live agent, but honestly, most of them are quite nice to pitchers. They may not say yes — in fact, most will not — but it’s seldom worth their energy to be genuinely unpleasant. (Would any of you planning to attend conferences soon like for me to go over how to write a pitch, by the way? I used to address it every summer, but conference season is much longer than it used to be: this year’s is starting right about now, I believe.) The one great exception, equally applicable to approaching agents by mail, e-mail, or face-to-face: the writer who is pushy to the point of rudeness. This brash soul either hasn’t bothered to learn the rules of polite approach or doesn’t think they apply to him. (Usually because but I want so much to get this book published, a sentiment which, naturally, differentiates this guy from EVERY OTHER ASPIRING WRITER OUT THERE.) What does he do that’s so terrible? He calls agents out a clear blue sky, instead of querying; his e-mails contain sweet expressions along the lines of you’ll be sorry forever if you let this one pass you by and other threats; he queries the same agent over and over, with a tenacity that the average pit bull would envy; he argues with agents who say, “No, thank you.” But my readership wouldn’t dream of acting in that manner, I’m convinced. All of you are far too nice — and have done your homework far too well — ever to do any of those things, right? You should worry about the rude aspiring writer, though, because he actually does affect you: many of the hoops through which respectful writers need to jump in order to convince an agent to read their work were erected in order to keep him at bay. Rules against calling agents unless they call you first, for instance, or stern admonitions from conference organizers not to bug agents in the hallways. These are not designed to keep polite people like you at a distance; they’re intended to ward off the few and the rude. I can feel some of you trembling already. Not to worry; if you follow the norms of the industry, you’re not going to offend an agent accidentally. (Unless you inadvertently mention you didn’t like a book you hadn’t realized she represented; again, doing your homework pays off.) Those contact restrictions work both ways, you know. Yes, you did read that correctly: the querying, pitching, and submission rules protect the conscientious writer, too. So kudos to you for taking your writing seriously enough to learn the ropes. <a href="/index_p_14229.html">Earlier in this series</a>, I went over the three accepted means of bringing your book politely to an agent’s attention: querying, either by sending a letter via regular mail (the classic method), approaching by sending an e-mail (the newfangled method) or through the agency’s website (the least controllable), and verbal pitching (far and away the most terrifying. Today, I’m going to talk about the various possibilities of response to your query or pitch — which, you may be happy to hear, are relatively limited and very seldom involve anyone being overtly mean. I heard that chortling, experienced pitchers and queriers: we’re talking overtly mean, not merely dismissive. There’s a big difference. And call me zany, but I find it hard to believe that the possibility of an agent’s being genuinely rude in response hadn’t occurred at least once to all of us before the first time we queried. So let’s pitch in, so to speak, to help those new to the game overcome those butterflies that seem to enjoy inhabiting the writerly stomach. To those of you who have never queried or pitched before, I reiterate: the probability that an agent will say something nasty to you about your book at the initial contact stage is quite low. S/he may not say what you want him or her to say — which is, of course, “Yes! I would absolutely love to read the book you’ve just queried/pitched!” — but s/he is not going to yell at you. At least, not if you’re polite in your approach and s/he is professional. At worst, s/he is going to say “No, thank you.” But just so you’re prepared, rookies: pretty much every writer who has landed an agent within the last decade heard “No, thank you,” many, many times before hearing, “Yes, of course.” Ditto with virtually every living author who has brought a first book out within the last ten years. (At least the ones who were not already celebrities in another field; celebrities have a much easier time attracting representation. Yes, life is not fair; this is news to you?) That’s just the way the game works these days. Translation: you should not feel bad if your first query does not elicit a positive response. Honestly, it would be unusual if it did, in the current market. “Okay, Anne,” those of you about to query or pitch for the first time quaver, clutching your butterfly-filled tummies, “I’ll bite. If an agent isn’t likely either to go into raptures or to fly into an insult-spewing rage after reading a query letter or hearing a pitch, what is likely to happen?” Glad you asked, butterfly-catchers. Let’s run through the most common possibilities. How can a writer tell whether a query or pitch has been successful? Contrary to popular opinion amongst aspiring writers, the query letter and pitch share a common goal: not to make the agent stand up and shout, “I don’t need to read this manuscript, by gum! I already know that I want to represent it!” but rather to induce her to ask to see pages of the manuscript. As we saw in the last couple of posts, those pages, along with anything else the agent might ask the writer to send (an author bio, for instance, or a synopsis) are known in the trade as requested materials. So figuring out whether a query or pitch did the trick is actually very simple: if the agent requested materials, it was. Congratulations! Enjoying this particular brand of success does not mean that a writer has landed an agent, however, it merely means that he’s cleared the first hurdle on the road to representation. Be pleased, certainly, but remember, asking to see your manuscript does not constitute a promise, even if an agent was really, really nice to you during a pitch meeting; it merely means that she is intrigued by your project enough to think that there’s a possibility that she could sell it in the current publishing market. Stop averting your eyes, please: I’m quite serious about this. Remember, pitchers, a nice conversation at a conference is just a nice conversation is at a conference, but a representation contract is a deal. Keep pitching and/or querying until the agent right for your work offers you the latter. So send what he asks to see, of course, but keep querying other agents, just to hedge your bets. No matter how much you want (or, in the case of face-to-face pitching, like) a particular agent, it’s not in your best interest to grant an effective exclusive to any agent who hasn’t actually asked for it; unless you are dealing with an agency with an exclusives-only policy (which should be stated openly on the agency’s website and in its agency guide listing), most agents will simply assume they’re not the only one looking at a manuscript. It’s up to you, of course. However, since turn-around times can be six months or more, even on an eagerly-solicited manuscript, waiting by the phone instead of dating around might not be the best strategy in the long term, if you catch my drift. All that applies if the answer is yes. But how does one know if the answer is no? If the agent decides not to request materials (also known as passing on the book), the query or pitch has been rejected. If so, the querier is usually informed of the fact by a form letter — or, in the case of e-mailed queries, by a boilerplate expression of regret. Because these sentiments are pre-fabricated and used for every rejection, don’t waste your energy trying to read some deeper interpretation into it; it just means no, thanks. (For more on the subject, please see the FORM-LETTER REJECTIONS category on the archive list on the lower right-hand side of this page.) Because pitching is done in person, agents often do give a reason if the answer is no. Often, the stated reason isn’t all that different from the reasoning typically found on a boilerplate rejection letter — I just don’t think I can sell that book in the current tough market; it doesn’t sound like the kind of book I represent; I might have been able to sell that story 2/5/20 years ago, but now… — but since it is considered quite rude to argue with an agent who has just said no to you, does it really matter why? Just thank the agent for his time, and walk away with dignity. Whether the response is positive or negative, it will definitely not be ambiguous: if your query has been successful, an agent will tell you so point-blank. It can be a trifle harder to tell with a verbal pitch, since many agents don’t like watching writers’ faces as they’re rejecting them — which is one reason that a writer is slightly more likely to receive a request for materials from a verbal pitch than a written query, by the way — and will try to let them down gently. They’re trying to be nice, you see. But again, there’s only one true test of whether a pitch or query worked: the agent will ask to see manuscript pages or a book proposal.. If you do receive such a request, congratulations! Feel free to rejoice, but do not fall into either the trap I mentioned above, assuming that the agent has already decided to sign you (he hasn’t, at this stage) or the one of assuming that you must print off the requested pages right away and overnight them to New York. Both are extremely common, especially amongst pitchers meeting agents for the first time, and both tend to get those new to submission into trouble. Before you do anything, take a nice, deep breath. You will be excited, but that’s precisely the reason that it’s a good idea to wait at least a week to before pulling your requested materials packet together — or at least before sending it. Why, you demand? It will give you enough time to calm down enough to make sure that you include everything the agent asked to see. It will also give you the opportunity to avail yourself of the in-depth advice under the HOW TO PUT TOGETHER A SUBMISSION PACKET category on the list at right. Until that happy day, let’s talk about some other possible agently reactions. What if a writer receives a response other than yes or no? If you receive a response that says (or implies) that the agency requires writers seeking to be clients to pay for editorial services or evaluation before signing them to contracts, DO NOT SAY YES; instead, check with the agents’ guild, the <a href="http://www.aaronline.org/mc/page.do">Association of Authors’ Representatives</a>, or <a href="http://anotherealm.com/prededitors/pubagent.htm">Preditors and Editors</a> to see if the agency is legit. You may also post a question on <a href="http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/">Absolute Write</a>. (The last has a lot of great resources for writers new to marketing themselves, by the way.) Why should you worry about whether an agency is on the up-and-up? Well, every year, a lot of aspiring writers fall prey to scams. Again, call me zany, but I would prefer that my readers not be amongst the unlucky many. The main thing to bear in mind in order to avoid getting taken: not everyone who says he’s an agent is one — and it can be awfully hard to tell the real from the fake based upon a website alone. Some of the most notorious frauds have some of the most polished and writer friendly websites. Scams work because in any given year, there literally millions of English-speaking writers looking to land an agent and get published, many of whom don’t really understand how reputable agencies work. Scammers prey upon that ignorance — and they can often get away with it, because in the United States, there are no technical qualifications for becoming an agent. Nor is there any required license. Yes, really: it’s possible just to hang up a shingle and start taking on clients. Or rather, start asking potential clients to pay them fees, either directly (as in the notorious We don’t work like other agencies, but we require a paid professional evaluation up front dodge) or by referring writers to a specific editing service (i.e., one that gives the agency kickbacks), implying that using this service is a prerequisite to representation. Reputable agents decide whether to represent a manuscript based upon direct readings; they do not require or expect other businesses to do it for them. Nor do they charge their clients up front for services (although some do charge photocopying fees). A legitimate agency makes its money by taking an agreed-upon percentage of the sales of their clients’ work. If any so-called agent tries to tell you otherwise, back away, quickly, and consult the <a href="http://www.aaronline.org/mc/page.do">Association of Authors’ Representatives</a> or <a href="http://anotherealm.com/prededitors/pubagent.htm">Preditors and Editors</a> immediately. (For a step-by-step explanation of how others have successfully handled this situation, run, don’t walk to the FEE-CHARGING AGENCIES category at right.) Heck, if you’re not sure if you should pay a requested fee, go ahead and post a question in the comments here. I would much, much rather you did that than got sucked into a scam. Better yet, check out any agent or agency before you query. It’s not very hard at all: the standard agency guides (like the Writers Digest <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Literary-Agents-Chuck-Sambuchino/dp/1582975035">GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS</a> and the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hermans-Publishers-Editors-Literary-Agents/dp/0977268241/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238366620&sr=1-2">Herman Guide</a>, both excellent and updated yearly) and websites like <a href="http://anotherealm.com/prededitors/pubagent.htm">Preditors and Editors</a> make it their business to separate the reputable from the disreputable. Fortunately, such scams are not very common. Still, it pays to be on your guard. What if a writer does not receive a response at all? More common these days is the agency that simply does not respond to queries at all. Agencies that prefer to receive queries online seem more prone to this rather rude practice, I’ve noticed, but over the last couple of years, I’ve been hearing more and more reports from writers whose queries (or even submissions, amazingly) were greeted with silence. In many instances, it’s actually become a matter of policy: check the agency’s website or listing in one of the standard agency guides to see if they state it openly. (For tips on how to decipher these sources, please see the HOW TO READ AN AGENCY LISTING category on the list at right.) A complete lack of response on a query letter does not necessarily equal rejection, incidentally, unless the agency’s website or listing in one of the standard agency guides says so explicitly. Queries do occasionally get lost, for instance; so do submissions. The single most common reason a writer doesn’t hear back, though, is that the agency hasn’t gotten around to reading it yet. Be patient — and keep querying other agents while you wait. Sensing a pattern here? There’s a good reason that I always urge writers to continue querying and pitching after an agent has expressed interest: it can take weeks or even months to hear back about a query, and an increasing number of agencies now reject queriers through silence. A writer who waits to hear from Agent #1 before querying Agent #2 may waste a great deal of time. Because agents are aware of this, the vast majority simply assume that the writers who approach them are also querying other agents; if they believe otherwise, they will say so on their websites or in their listings in agency guides. What should a writer do if her query was rejected? Again, the answer is pretty straightforward: try another agent. Right away, if possible. What it most emphatically does not mean is that you should give up. Contrary to what virtually every rejected writer believes, rejection does not necessarily mean that the book concept is a poor one; it may just means that the agent doesn’t represent that kind of book, or that she just spent a year attempting to sell a similar book and failed (yes, it happens; landing an agent is no guarantee of publication), or that this book category isn’t selling very well at the moment. The important thing to bear in mind is that at the query or pitching stage, the book could not possibly have been rejected because the manuscript was poorly written . The query might have been rejected for that reason, naturally, but it’s logically impossible for an agent to pass judgment on a manuscript’s writing quality without reading it. One thing you should not do: once a writer received a formal rejection letter or e-mail, it’s considered rude to query or pitch that book project to the same agent again. (See why it’s so important to proofread your query?) At some agencies, that prohibition extends to all of the member agents; however, this is not always the case. Regardless, unless a rejecting agent actually tells a writer never to approach him again, a writer may always query again with a new book project. Contrary to an apparently immortal rumor that’s been haunting the conference circuit for years, however, being rejected by one agency has absolutely no effect upon the query’s probability of being rejected by another. There is no national database, for instance, that agents check to see who else has seen or rejected a particular manuscript (a rumor I have heard as recently as two months ago), nor do agencies maintain databases to check whether they have heard from a specific querier before. If you’re going to get caught for re-querying the same agency, it will be because someone at the agency remembers your book project. You really don’t want to tempt them by sending the same query three months after your last was rejected, though; people who work at agencies tend to have good memories, and an agent who notices that he’s received the same query twice will almost always reject it the second time around, on general principle. In this economy, however, it’s certainly not beyond belief that an agent who feels that he cannot sell a particular book right now may feel quite differently a year or two hence. And the individual Millicent who opened a query may well have moved on to pastures new by next year. I leave the matter of whether to re-query to your conscience, along with the issue of whether it’s kosher to wait a year and send a query letter to an agent who didn’t bother to respond the last time around. And there’s one thing that you should not do under any circumstances: try to talk the agent into changing his mind. If your query (or manuscript, for that matter) has been rejected, resist the temptation to contact the agent to argue about it, either in writing or by picking up the phone. It will only end in tears. Why? I can tell you now that that no matter how good your argument is, you will not convince the agent that his rejection was a mistake. It will merely annoy him, and the last thing your book deserves is for the agent who rejected it to have a great story about an unusually obnoxious writer to tell at cocktail parties. In answer to what you just thought: yes, they do swap Wow, That Writer Was Rude stories. Seldom with names attached, but still, you don’t want to be the subject of one. The no-argument rule is doubly applicable for face-to-face pitching. It’s just not a fight a writer can win. Move on — because, honestly, the only thing that will genuinely represent a win here is your being signed by another agent. It’s completely natural to feel anger at being rejected, of course, but bickering with or yelling at (yes, I’ve seen it happen) is not the most constructive way to deal with it. What is, you ask? Sending out another query letter right away. Or four. Before you do, however, double-check that the next agent on your list — and the next, and the next — actually do represent your type of book. Typically, agents give their Millicents a list of criteria that a query must meet in order to be eligible for acceptance, including the single most common reason queries get rejected: pitching a type of book that the agent does not represent. There’s absolutely nothing personal about that rejection; it’s just a matter of fit. Why, you ask? Read on. Book categories and why they are your friends No single agent represents every kind of book there is: like editors at publishing houses, they specialize. While this may seem frustrating or confusing to an aspiring writer new to the agent-seeking process, in the long run, it’s actually in the writer’s interest. As we saw a few days ago, agents sell their clients’ work by taking it to editors they know already to be interested in the subject matter or genre — and because they make money only if they can sell their clients’ work, it isn’t to their benefit to show a book to anyone who isn’t likely to publish it. Rather than relying upon vague impressions about who likes what kind of book or time-consuming descriptions of every single book on offer, everyone in the publishing industry uses specific terms when discussing them. Each type of book has a one- or two-word description known in the publishing industry as a book category. The people an agent knows at publishing houses who she is positive will be interested in the types of books she sells AND respect her opinion about writing enough to take her calls are known as her connections. The better an agent’s track record of selling a particular type of book, the better and more extensive her connections will be. Similarly, if an agency has a long history of selling a certain type of book, even junior agents there may reasonably be expected to have pretty good connections for it. Thus the frequent appeal of a large and/or well-established agency over a small or newer one: when the agents enjoy good connections, it’s easier for them to slip a first-time author’s manuscript under the right pair of eyes. Everyone benefits. However, good connections require agent specialization. The publishing industry is immense and complex; it would be impossible for even the best-established agent to have connections for every conceivable type of book. By concentrating upon just a few kinds of manuscript, then, an agent can concentrate upon his established areas of strength. What does this mean for the average aspiring writer? Glad you asked. Writers, too, are specialists, even ones like me who write several different types of book. However broad one’s interests and capacities might be, no one is going to write in every conceivable book category, right? Therefore, it’s in each writer’s interest to have his work represented not by just any old agent, but by one who shares his interests — and, more importantly, who already has the connections to sell his books. In other words, specialists of a feather should flock together. Agents are well aware of the substantial benefits of such an arrangement, which is why they are seldom reticent about the kinds of books they want. They will state the book categories they represent right on their websites, in their listings in the standard agency guides, and often in their biographical blurbs in writers’ conference brochures as well. So there’s no mystery to finding out who represents what: it’s usually as easy as a straightforward Google search or opening a book. Benefiting from knowledge so obtained, however, requires that an aspiring writer be aware of the book category into which his book most comfortably fits. Select one that already exists, if you please, rather than just making one up. You should also pick just one, rather than stringing a few together into an unholy hyphenate like Mystery-Science Fiction-Romantica-Western. Generally speaking, though, aspiring writers agonize far too much over making the right choice: just pick one. Remember, the goal here is not to cover every topic in the book, but rather to give your future agent and editor some indication of who is likely to buy your book and on which shelf at Barnes & Noble a reader might eventually find it. It’s a technical designation, after all, not a synopsis. Think of it as the conceptual box that the agent of your dreams will want to unwrap. Do be aware, too, that many categories overlap — fiction, women’s fiction, and literary fiction, for instance, share quite a bit of common ground — so you may not find a perfect fit. That’s fine; as long as you’re close, your future agent will be able to tell you how to categorize it. If you live in the U.S. or Canada, a good place to start is by tracking down a recently-released paperback or trade paper book similar to yours and examining the back cover. Many publishers will display the book category in one of two places, in the upper-left corner: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/sarah-vowells-back-cover-ii-300x225.jpg" alt="sarah-vowells-back-cover-ii" title="sarah-vowells-back-cover-ii" width="300" height="225" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-3624"/> Actually, now that I’ve posted it, I notice that Sarah Vowell’s <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0743260031-0">ASSASSINATION VACATION</a> (a terrific book for anyone interested in political history, by the way; she’s a very funny writer) is listed in two categories: biography and travel. That makes perfect sense, because the book both talks about the lives of various murdered American presidents and follows Ms. Vowell’s journeys to their assassination sites. (Seriously, it’s funny.) The other common locale for a book category is in the box with the barcode: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/jonathan-selwood-back-cover-225x300.jpg" alt="jonathan-selwood-back-cover" title="jonathan-selwood-back-cover" width="225" height="300" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-3628"/> Okay, so that last photo was a trifle askew. However, since Jonathan Selwood’s <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780061173875-1">THE PINBALL THEORY OF APOCALYPSE</a> (six rows’ worth of passengers on an airplane thought I was having some sort of fit because I was laughing so hard at one point; once I had fended off medical assistance and read the passage in question out loud, the flight attendants came running to find out what was wrong with all of us) partially concerns the aftermath of a major earthquake, that seems rather appropriate. I’m not sure if the photo will reproduce clearly enough for you to see it, but Mssr. Selwood’s book is designated merely as fiction. Counter-intuitively, this general-sounding moniker refers to something quite specific: novels for adults that do not fit into a genre designation. For all of you whose first thought upon my telling you that you would need to narrow down your complex 400-page book into a one- or at most two-word category choice, this might be a good selection. It can be rather a pain to decide, admittedly, but once you have determined your book’s category, the hunt for an agent to represent it becomes substantially simpler: you don’t even need to consider approaching an agent who doesn’t represent your category. And why is that, veterans of last autumn’s Querypalooza? If you shouted, “Because that would be a waste of my valuable querying or pitching time!” give yourself a gold star for the day. Since agents habitually represent only certain types of book, offering them another variety is only courting rejection. Acceptance is what we want to court around here, right? Keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-3751" class="post-3751 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-after-you-receive-a-request-for-pages category-after-you-submit category-after-youve-made-a-successful-pitch category-e-mailed-submissions category-e-mailing-queries category-getting-that-submission-out-the-door category-how-do-i-make-the-page-numbering-start-somewhere-other-than-the-first-page-of-the-document category-how-do-i-remove-the-slug-line-from-the-title-page category-how-to-e-mail-requested-materials category-how-to-put-together-a-submission-packet category-how-to-remove-a-slug-line-from-a-title-page category-how-to-respond-to-a-request-for-a-partial category-keeping-the-faith category-print-on-demand-pod category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-realistic-expectations-for-submitters category-realistic-expectations-for-writers category-slug-line category-what-an-agent-will-expect-a-new-client-to-know-about-the-publishing-industry-a-crash-course category-what-an-agent-will-expect-your-manuscript-to-look-like category-what-do-i-do-if-my-pitch-works category-what-happens-after-i-submit-requested-materials category-what-should-i-do-if-ive-received-a-request-for-pages category-why-havent-i-heard-back-yet"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/22/just-what-am-i-getting-myself-into-part-iii-but-what-happens-after-my-query-arrives-at-the-agency-11/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2011-01-22T00:00:00+00:00">January 22, 2011</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/22/just-what-am-i-getting-myself-into-part-iii-but-what-happens-after-my-query-arrives-at-the-agency-11/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/#comments">2 Comments on Just what am I getting myself into? Part III: but what happens after my query arrives at the agency?</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/22/just-what-am-i-getting-myself-into-part-iii-but-what-happens-after-my-query-arrives-at-the-agency-11/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark">Just what am I getting myself into? Part III: but what happens after my query arrives at the agency?</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/cat-on-the-wall-300x225.jpg" alt="cat-on-the-wall" title="cat-on-the-wall" width="300" height="225" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-3649"/> Before any of you sprain your brains by trying to figure out what a fluffy cat standing on a partially-finished stone wall (my yard still has quite a few of those, even years after <a href="/index_p_2719.html">our brief-but-scarifying encounter with the World’s Worst Landscaper™</a>) has to do with the promised topic du jour, what happens to requested materials, let me stop you mid-ponder: the picture above isn’t particularly illustrative of anything I’m about to say today. I just thought that after so many days of such lengthy posts on such serious subjects, we all could stand a glimpse of something comparatively light-hearted. How so, those of you joining us late in my latest obsession ask? I’ve been spending the last few posts on an overview of how books currently get published in the United States: not the astonishingly pervasive fantasy that all a good writer has to do to get published is to write a book — period — but the actual logistics of what happens. The view from the trenches, as it were. Oh, dear: I suppose that does mean that the photograph is subject-appropriate. I honestly hadn’t intended it to be. So far, we’ve gone over how US-based publishing has changed over time; how fiction and nonfiction are marketed differently; why a writer needs an agent if she wants to get published by a major house, and the various methods of seeking representation, along with their pros and cons. Is everyone fairly clear on all of those? If not, please feel free to post questions in via the comments functions — or, better yet, to seek out more detailed answers amongst the many and varied categories on the archive list on the lower right-hand side of this page, and then ask some of your patented trenchant follow-up questions. Yes, yes, I know: I have been harping on the archives quite a bit over the last couple of posts, but with good reason, I assure you. This discussion intended to give those new to trying to get their work published — and anyone else who feels like reading it — a general overview of how the process works, as opposed to my favored approach, the let’s-concentrate-on-this-one-small-aspect-for-a-week method of analysis. Both have their benefits, of course, but if you are looking for elucidation on any of the individual points I’m discussing here, chances are that you will find far more discussion than you ever dreamed in the archived posts. So if delving into the archive list starts to feel like trying to catalogue the contents of Pandora’s box, well, don’t say that I didn’t warn you. For those of you who long for a return to specificity, well, wait a day. Today’s post is laying the groundwork for a very practical post tomorrow. Back we go to the generalities. Since I know that many of you have are gearing up to send out your first round of queries for the year (having, wisely, not mailed or e-mailed them off precisely when every other aspiring writer in North America did, immediately after January 1, to fulfill a resolution), let’s pull the pin on a very common stress grenade: what happens if one of queries or pitches is successful? What a writer should do if an agent requests pages If a query or pitch operates as you hope it will, an agent will typically ask the writer to send either the entire manuscript (rare), a specified number of pages from the beginning of the book (substantially more common), or, for nonfiction, the book proposal. Unless the agent specifically tells you otherwise, this means that he is expecting to receive it as hard copy, sent by regular mail. Yes, even if you originally contacted the agent via e-mail or through the agency’s website. Publishing is still largely a paper-based enterprise, after all. If an agent prefers e-mailed submissions, she will tell you point-blank, asking you to send it as a Word attachment to an e-mail. (Under no circumstances should you ever send a computer disk or CD-R with your book on it — it will be returned without being opened.) Occasionally, an agent will request a PDF, but regardless, send any requested electronic materials in Microsoft Word — and as a .doc file, not .docx, so even an agent operating on a very old computer will be able to read it. (If you work on a Mac, make sure to send it as a Windows-friendly document — and do be aware that older versions of Windows prefer shorter document titles than any version of Word for the Mac.) I cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is to respect this norm, so allow me to repeat it: if you have been asked submit electronically, the attachment the agent has in mind is the industry standard, a .doc file in MS Word, unless she specifically tells you otherwise. Sending it in any other format will generally get the submission rejected unread. Why Word? It’s what the major publishing houses use, so if the agent of your dreams is going to submit electronically to a publishing house, that’s how the editor would expect to receive it. It’s also the format a publishing contract will specify for the soft copy Author X must deliver to the publisher by Date Y. I hear those of you Word groaning, but submitting in another format — or with a document the agent cannot open — is widely considered unprofessional. At minimum, it displays a belief that format doesn’t matter, and thus an ignorance of how publishing works in this country. And what conclusion is Millicent the agency screener likely to draw about a writer who seems unfamiliar with the norms of the biz, campers? That’s right: such a writer is inherently more time-consuming to represent. The agent will have to invest quite a bit of time in teaching him the ropes. Try to think about the necessary conversion in terms of all the time it will save you in the long run. If the agent of your dreams likes to submit to editors electronically, you would have to present her with a Word file for your work, anyway. You’re just jumping the gun a little. Back to practicalities. Occasionally, an agent will ask for attachments as rtf (rich text format), a version without the formatting bells and whistles that render documents hard to translate across word processing systems; if you don’t habitually work in Word, but send your document in rtf, any Word user should be able to open it. As I mentioned above, some agents request submissions in PDF format — especially those who choose to read submissions on a Kindle, rather than on a computer screen, as is becoming increasingly common — but it’s seldom preferred, as it’s hard to edit. Other than that, an electronically-submitted manuscript is identical to one to be submitted in hard copy: in standard format — with a title page, so the agent of your dreams may contact you to tell you how much she loved it. Include the title page as the first page of the manuscript document, not as a separate file. The title page should neither be numbered nor have a slug line; the first page of text is page 1. If the prospect of figuring out how to make that happen induced a swoon, never fear: it’s actually quite easy in Word. Under the FORMAT menu, select DOCUMENT, then LAYOUT. You will find an option for DIFFERENT FIRST PAGE. Once you click that, you can go into the header and remove the slug line for the first page of your document, and thus the page number. I see some raised hands waving frantically out there in the ether. “But Anne,” disembodied voices everywhere cry, “that would only get rid of the page number as it appears on the first page. If I copy-and-paste my title page into my text document, wouldn’t the first page of text end up being labeled page 2?” Why yes, it would, disembodied questioners — unless you were clever enough to have set the pagination to begin at zero. To accomplish that, while you are tinkering with the header, choose the FORMATTING PALETTE from under the VIEW menu, then select HEADER AND FOOTER. The FORMAT PAGE NUMBER option will offer you the opportunity to select what number the pagination will START AT… Type in 0, and you’re home free. If the agency accepts submissions in both hard or soft copy, which should I choose? Given my druthers, I would always opt for hard copy. Why? Because the human eye reads much more quickly on a backlit screen than on a printed page. It’s more conducing to skimming than hard copy, even for professional readers. (Perhaps especially for professional readers, who have a lot of submissions to get through in a day.) It’s also more work for an agent to reject a paper copy, as opposed to the single action of hitting the DELETE key required to remove an e-submission from her life forever. That’s also true of mailed vs. e-mailed queries, incidentally, if you’re approaching an agency that informs queriers about rejections at all. (Many don’t these days, so check submission guidelines carefully.) Don’t believe me? Okay, think about it: to reject a hard-copy manuscript, Millicent has to pull the SASE out of the query packet, grab a form letter off the top of the stack on her desk, fold it, and stuff it into the SASE. Rejecting an electronic query, on the other hand, requires at most pasting form-letter rejection into a return e-mail — or, again, simply hitting the DELETE key. Much less work. However an agent has asked you to submit, though, do as he asks. If there is one inviolable rule to bear in mind while preparing a submission packet, it is surely send the agent precisely what he has asked you to send. Not following this basic precept can — and almost always does — result in instant rejection. That deserves its own heading, does it not? How do I know what to put in the submission packet? Shout it out with me, campers: send precisely what the agent asked to see — no more, no less. Plus a SASE, if you’re submitting by mail. Being hyper-literal often doesn’t serve an aspiring very well along the frequently perilous road to publication, but submission is one instance where it’s positively a boon. If the agent asked to see the first 50 pages, send the first 50 pages — not the first 49, if a chapter happens to end there, or 55 if there’s a really exciting scene after page 50. If page 50 ends mid-sentence, so be it. Why is it so very important to follow submission instructions exactly? Because the quality of the writing is not necessarily the only factor an agent weighs in deciding whether to represent a client. The ability to follow directions to the letter tends to be a quality that agents LOVE to see in potential clients, since it implies the writers in question possess two skills absolutely essential to working well with an editor — no, make that three: an ability to listen or read well, a capacity for setting goals and meeting them, and a professional attitude. That’s right, those of you who did a double-take at that first one: those reading comprehension problems on the SAT actually did relate to something practical in adult life. A writer who has a hard time reading an e-mail from her agent and doing what she’s been asked to do is — wait for it — inherently more time-consuming to represent than a writer with good reading comprehension skills. As your first opportunity for demonstrating your sterling reading comprehension skills, getting the contents of the submission packet right is monumentally important. Yes, even if you receive the request for materials verbally. strong> If an agent asks you for pages in the course of a pitch meeting, take the time to write down a list of what the he is asking you to send. Read it back to him, to make sure you caught everything. (Trust me, if you’re face-to-face with an agent who has just said yes to you, you won’t be thinking with your usual clarity.) If the agent makes the request in writing, read the missive through several times, then sit down and make a list of what he’s asked you to send. Wait at least 24 hours before re-reading the communication to double-check that every requested item made it onto the list. THEN assemble your submission packet, checking off each element as you place it into the envelope or box. <a href="/index_p_734.html">Clever longtime reader Tad</a> came up with a brilliant extra level of fail-safe reading comprehension security: after you have assembled the submission packet, hand it, your list, and a copy of the letter from the agent to someone you trust — a parent, a significant other, a best friend, or any other friendly, detail-oriented person you’re relatively certain isn’t harboring a secret desire to see you miserable — and ask that person to check that (a) the letter and the list correspond exactly and (b) you’ve included every necessary element in the packet. Yes, it’s that vital to get it right. Throughout the last few paragraphs, I’ve been sensing some confusion out in the ether. “But Anne,” a few timid souls pipe up, “am I missing something here? How difficult could it possibly be to print up the number of pages the agent requests, place them in an envelope, and pop it in the mail? Are you saying that she might ask to see something other than the manuscript?” Often, yes. There are also a couple of elements that any US-based agent will expect to see in a submission packet, whether or not she asks you to include them. What might an agent ask to be sent — and what should you always send anyway? Since there is no industry-wide standardization of what precisely belongs in a submission packet, any given agent may ask for a different array — and you already know to send precisely what each asks you to send, right? However, the most commonly-requested elements are: * The requested pages in standard manuscript format, unbound. The most popular lengths to ask for are the first chapter, the first three chapters, the first 50 pages, the first 100 pages, and the entire manuscript. Every page should be in <a href="/index_p_13667.html">standard format for manuscripts</a> (i.e., not like a published book, nor should it be identical to a short story submission). A few cautionary notes, for the benefit of those of you who missed <a href="/index_p_13616.html">my recent Formatpalooza series</a>: manuscripts absolutely must be double-spaced, in 12-point type (preferably Times, Times New Roman, or Courier), printed on only one side of the page with one-inch margins, and feature indented paragraphs. (No, business format is not proper here — for a full explanation, please see the BUSINESS FORMAT VS INDENTED PARAGRAPHS category at right.) * A synopsis. For fiction, this is a description of the major twists and turns of the plot, told as vividly as possible. (Remember what I said earlier about every syllable you submit to an agent being a writing sample?) For nonfiction, it’s a summary of the central question the book will address, why the question is important to answer, and a brief indication of what evidence you will use to bolster your arguments. For tips on how to pull this off in what is often an intimidatingly small number of pages, please see the HOW TO WRITE A SYNOPSIS FROM SCRATCH and/or HOW TO WRITE A NONFICTION SYNOPSIS categories at right.) * An author bio. This is an extended version of the 1-paragraph description of your life, with emphasis upon your writing credentials, your education, and any experience that would lead an observer to regard you as an expert on the subject matter of your book. For a crash course on how to write one, please see the HOW TO WRITE AN AUTHOR BIO category. (Hey, I wasn’t kidding about there being a whole lot of elucidation of details on this site.) * The book proposal. As I mentioned a few days ago, book proposals are marketing packets used to sell nonfiction. For an explanation of what should go into it and how to put it together, please see the HOW TO WRITE A BOOK PROPOSAL category. (This is starting to read like the back of a greatest hits album, isn’t it?) * A marketing plan. This request was unheard-of for novels until just a couple of years ago, but recently, the marketing plan has been enjoying a vogue. For fiction, it’s the same document as the similar section in the book proposal (and thus a description of how to write one may be found under the HOW TO WRITE A BOOK PROPOSAL category): a description the target audience for the book and how to reach them. Bear in mind that what anyone who asks to see a marketing plan has in mind is what the author will be doing to promote the book, not the publishing house’s efforts, so just saying, “I will make myself available to go on a book tour,” probably isn’t going to impress anybody. Think creatively: who is your target reader, and where do folks like that congregate, physically or virtually? Those are what an agent will probably ask to see. For tips on how to present these professionally, how to box them up, in what order they should be stacked, etc., please see the HOW TO PUT TOGETHER A SUBMISSION PACKET category at right. (Oh, you thought I would send you into that minefield without any guidance?) Here is a list of what she will almost certainly not mention in her request, but your submission will appear substantially more professional if you also include: * A cover letter thanking the agent for asking to see the requested materials and repeating the writer’s contact information. I’m always astonished at how many aspiring writers just throw a manuscript into an envelope without even attempting any polite preliminaries. It’s rude — and, given how many queries an agency processes in any given week, it’s not a grand idea to assume that the person who opens your submission envelope — almost certainly Millicent, not the agent herself — will instantly recall who you are. (For guidelines on how to construct this important missive, please see the COVER LETTERS FOR SUBMISSIONS category at right.) * A title page for your manuscript or partial. Again, most submitters omit this, but an already-established writer would never dream of submitting a manuscript anywhere without a title page, since a professional title page includes information absolutely vital to marketing the book: the book category, the word count, the title (of course), the author’s contact information. (For an explanation of all of these elements, how to put them together on a page, and illustrations of what a professionally-formatted title page looks like, please see the HOW TO FORMAT A TITLE PAGE category at right.) * A stamped, self-addressed envelope (SASE). As with queries, not including a SASE is generally considered an instant-rejection offense. While it’s classy to include a letter-sized SASE in case the agent wants to respond in writing, the SASE in a submission is an envelope or box labeled with your address and enough postage (stamps, not metered) to mail it back to you. (If that sounds complicated, don’t fret: you’ll find a complete explanation of how to handle the many permutations of SASE use under the SASE GUIDELINES category at right.) Why do you need to include a SASE for your manuscript’s return? Well, unless the agent decides to sign you to a representation contract, she’s not going to hang onto your manuscript — and since not all agencies have recycling programs (yes, I know; it’s discouraging to tree-lovers everywhere), those rejected pages are just going to land in the trash. Confused? It wouldn’t be altogether surprising if you were: the logistics of submission are much more complex than the vast majority of aspiring writers realize. For a much fuller explanation of how to juggle all of these elements into a professional-looking package, check out the HOW TO PUT TOGETHER A SUBMISSION PACKET category at right. A word to the wise: since agencies receive many, many submissions, both requested and not, with every single mail delivery, it’s an excellent idea to write REQUESTED MATERIALS in great, big letters on the top of the envelope or box containing your submission packet. This will help ensure that your package ends up in the right pile on the right desk. As unsolicited manuscripts are almost universally rejected unread, the last thing in the world you want is for your requested materials to be mistaken for them, right? For the same reason, if an agent has asked you to submit pages via e-mail, it’s prudent to include the words REQUESTED MATERIALS in the subject line of the e-mail. Better safe than sorry, I always say. Oh, and before I forget, let me reiterate that grand old piece of traditional writerly advice from the first post in this series: never, ever send an agent — or anybody else, for that matter — your only copy of anything. To that, allow me to add Anne’s Axiom of Submission: never spend the money to ship anything to an agent overnight unless they specifically ask you to do so. Contrary to popular opinion amongst aspiring writers, overnight shipping will not get your packet read any quicker, so it’s just a waste of money. Within the US, the significantly less expensive Priority Mail will get it there within 2-3 business days, which is quite fast enough. Assuming that at least some of you are still with me, I shall now move on to the single most-asked question amongst submitters everywhere: Okay, now I’ve sent my submission packet. How soon will I hear back? Well, let me put it this way: I wouldn’t advise holding your breath. Even if you submit a partial and an agent decides that she’d like to see the rest of the book, you’re probably not going to hear about that exciting development right away. Stop glaring at me like that. You’ll save yourself a lot of heartache if you understand this: no matter how enthusiastically an agent solicited a manuscript, trust me, she will neither have cleared her schedule in anticipation of receiving your materials nor will drop everything to read it the instant it arrives. Agents are extremely busy people, and even before the one currently occupying your daydreams can take a gander at your submission, it will have to be read and approved by a Millicent. Sometimes more than one. So expecting to hear back within a few days or weeks is, well, not particularly realistic. As with query letters, the length of time an agency takes to make a decision on a manuscript varies wildly, but in these days of shrinking agency staffs — are you sitting down? — it’s typically measured in months. And not necessarily one or two, either. It’s not at all unusual for a writer not to hear back for 3-6 months on a submission. Heck, I know writers who have been startled by representation offers after more than a year. There is one grand exception to this general rule, however: if an agent knows that there are other agents competing to represent you (should you find yourself in that enviable position anytime soon, congratulations, and please see the WHAT IF MORE THAN ONE AGENT ASKS TO SEE MY MANUSCRIPT? category at right), he — or, more likely, his assistant — will sometimes bump your manuscript up in the reading queue. If you can legitimately tell him that another agent has already made an offer, you will be astonished at how quick a turn-around time can be. Otherwise, expect your packet to have to do some serious time in a pile, along with all of the other submissions awaiting review. Most agencies list their average turn-around times on their websites or in their agency guide listings, to alert aspiring writers to what can be an extended wait. Why does it take so long, you wail? Well, as I said, there will probably be quite a few manuscripts that arrived before yours. If waiting in a queue seems unfair now, think about it again after an agent has had a manuscript for a month: how would you feel if one that arrived today were read before yours? Another reason that turn-around times tend to be slow is — again, you might want to brace yourself against a large, supportive piece of furniture– the agent who requested the materials is not usually the only, or even the first, person to read a submission. Remember our pal Millicent? Guess what her job entails after she finishes screening all of those query letters? That’s right: she’s usually the one deciding whether a submission makes the first cut; at some agencies, two Millicents have to agree that a manuscript is of publishable quality AND a good fit for the agency before the agent sees it. Hey, I told you to brace yourself. Unfortunately, as long-time readers of this blog are already glumly aware, Millicents are trained to find reasons to reject manuscripts first and foremost, rather than reasons to accept them: since her job is to thin the number of submissions her boss will have to read (often in the agent’s spare time, rather than at work, incidentally: yet another reason that turn-around times tend to be slow), a good Millicent may reject as many as 90% of submissions before they get anywhere near the agent. (For a truly frightening look at some of the most common criteria she uses to thin the herd, you might want to check out the FIRST PAGES AGENTS DISLIKE or AGENCY SCREENERS’ PET PEEVES OF THE NOTORIOUS VARIETY categories at right. I warn you, however, these posts are not for the faint of heart.) Even more unfortunately, submitters are seldom given concrete reasons for rejection any more. (For a thoroughly depressing explanation why, please see the FORM-LETTER REJECTIONS category at right.) This means, in practice, that an aspiring writer may not gain any useable revision information from the submission process at all. I know; it’s awful. If I ran the universe, or even just the publishing industry, it would not be this way. Queriers and submitters alike would receive meticulous kindly-worded explanations of why Millicent or her boss had decided to reject them, so it would be easier to learn something from the process. Public libraries would also be open 24 hours per day, staffed by magnificently well-read and well-paid staff more than willing to stock good self-published and print-on-demand books (as most US libraries currently will not, as a matter of policy), and hand out ice cream to every child departing with a checked-out book, in order to instill in wee ones the idea that the library is the best place ever. Under my benevolent régime, schoolteachers would also be paid exceptionally well, every citizen could afford to buy a few books by promising new authors every week, and municipal fountains would flow freely with chocolate milk for all to enjoy. Oh, and Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker, and Madame de Staël’s birthdays would be international holidays. In case you may not have noticed, none of these delightful things is yet true — I share a birthday with ol’ Truman, and I have yet to observe any public rejoicing. So I think it’s safe to assume that I don’t yet run the universe. Sorry about that. Despite deviating sharply from what I personally would like to see happen, the submission process is far from impossible to navigate: every year, hundreds of first-time authors impress agents enough to land representation contracts. But there is a reason that acquiring an agent is so often described in fishing terms: she landed a great agent, his agent is a great catch. Sometimes they’re biting; sometimes they aren’t. Being aware of that going into the process can help a writer keep pushing forward. Which is precisely what you need to keep doing while an agency is pondering your manuscript: keep your chin up, keep querying and submitting to other agents, and keep writing on your next book. That’s the sane and sensible way for a savvy writer to make her way through this often intimidating and mysterious process — don’t put all of your proverbial eggs into a single basket, especially not one being toted by someone as professionally touchy as Millicent. That way lies despair. Whatever you do during what can be an extended wait to hear back about your manuscript, DO NOT pick up the phone and call the agent to demand what on earth could possibly be taking so long. Trust me, it will not get your submission read faster — in fact, it might get your manuscript rejected on the spot. Being pushy is not — how shall I put this? — likely to make you any friends at the agency. Why? Well, it’s considered quite rude in the industry for a writer to try to rush a decision. (Interesting, considering that writers often have only a week or two to decide whether to accept a publishing offer, and most agents will expect a yes or no on a representation offer right away.) If it’s been more than twice the length of time the agent told you to expect (or twice the average time listed on the agency’s website or guide listing), you may send a polite e-mail or letter, asking for confirmation that the agency has received your submission packet and offering to send another — they do occasionally go astray — but that’s it. (For a fuller analysis of this situation and other slow turn-arounds, please see the WHY HAVEN’T I HEARD BACK YET? category at right.) Wow, that ended on a down note, didn’t it? Aren’t you glad that included that nice, cheery picture of my cat, to perk us all up? Now that you’re already thinking about the perils and joys of electronic submission, I shall be devoting my next post to a brief detour into the ins and outs of e-querying. (I have not forgotten you, question-askers!) After that, I shall work on dispelling some fears about querying, as well as what kinds of reactions an aspiring writer may reasonably expect following an attempt to approach an agent. Since the annual New Year’s Resolution Avalanche is drawing to a close, I want everyone to be psyched up, not psyched out, about sending out those queries and submissions at the beginning of February. Hey, cheerleading is just one of the many services we offer here at Author! Author! As always, keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-3585" class="post-3585 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-advances category-after-you-land-a-publisher category-agency-contracts category-agents category-book-contracts category-conference-etiquette category-conference-faux-pas category-conference-lore category-conference-pitching category-e-mailing-queries category-editorial-committees category-editorial-memos category-editors category-getting-paid-for-your-writing category-hallway-pitching category-hardcover-vs-trade-paper category-how-authors-get-paid-for-their-books category-how-do-manuscripts-get-published category-how-much-time-passes-between-contract-and-publication category-industry-etiquette category-industry-terminology category-is-it-ok-to-query-several-agents-at-once category-keeping-the-faith category-must-reads category-nonfiction-marketing category-nonfiction-proposals category-pitching-faux-pas category-pitching-tips category-querying category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-realistic-expectations-for-writers category-should-i-bring-my-manuscript-to-a-pitch-meeting category-titling-your-work category-unsolicited-submissions category-wait-i-might-not-get-to-choose-my-books-title category-what-an-agent-will-expect-a-new-client-to-know-about-the-publishing-industry-a-crash-course category-what-are-the-polite-ways-to-approach-an-agent category-who-has-ultimate-say-over-a-books-title category-why-do-i-need-an-agent category-why-you-shouldnt-query-every-agent-in-the-country category-writing-samples"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/20/just-what-am-i-getting-myself-into-part-ii-the-money-matters-13/industry-etiquette/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2011-01-20T00:00:00+00:00">January 20, 2011</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/20/just-what-am-i-getting-myself-into-part-ii-the-money-matters-13/industry-etiquette/#comments">2 Comments on Just what am I getting myself into? Part II: the money matters</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/20/just-what-am-i-getting-myself-into-part-ii-the-money-matters-13/industry-etiquette/" rel="bookmark">Just what am I getting myself into? Part II: the money matters</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <a href="/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/public-market-sign.JPG"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/public-market-sign-1024x768.jpg" alt="" title="public market sign" width="512" height="384" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-10120"/></a> After our long, in-depth foray into the delights of standard format for manuscripts, and as a segue into what I hope will be an extended romp through craft, with particular emphasis upon problems that tend to generate knee-jerk rejection responses, I’m devoting a few days this week to explaining briefly how a manuscript moves from the writer’s fingertips to publication. (My, that was lengthy sentence, was it not? The late Henry James would have been so proud.) There are several ways that this can happen, of course, and but for now, I’m concentrating upon what most people mean by a book’s getting published: being brought to press and promoted by a large publisher. In the US, that publisher’s headquarters will probably be located in New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. Everyone clear on the parameters — and that what I am about to say might not be applicable to a big publishing house in Paris, Johannesburg, or Vladivostok, or to a small publisher domestically? Good. Let’s recap a bit from last time. While we’re at it, let’s get conversant with some of the terms of the trade. How a manuscript typically comes to publication at a major U.S. publishing house these days (as opposed to way back when) As we discussed, fiction is typically sold as a completed manuscript; nonfiction is usually sold as a book proposal, a packet of marketing materials that includes a sample chapter and a competitive market analysis, showing how the proposed book will offer the target readership something different and better than similar books already on the market. While the proposal will also include a summary of each of the chapters in the book-to-be-written (in a section known as the annotated table of contents; for tips on how to construct this and the other constituent parts of a book proposal, please see the HOW TO WRITE A BOOK PROPOSAL category on the archive list at right), the editor will often ask the writer to add or subtract chapters or change the book’s running order. Which underscores a point I made last time: a nonfiction book proposal is essentially a job application wherein the writer is trying to convince the publisher to pay him to write the book being proposed; a novel is a product that the author is trying to sell. I can already feel some of your eyes glazing over from jargon fatigue, can’t I? Hang in there; I assure you that there are plot twists to come. A hundred years ago, writers who wished to get their books published went about it in a fairly straightforward manner, by approaching editors at major publishing houses directly. If the editor the author approached liked the book, he would take it to what was (and still is) known as an editorial committee, a group of editors and higher-ups who collectively decided what books the house would bring out in the months and years to come. If the editorial committee decided to go ahead with the project, the publisher would typically pay the author an advance against projected royalties, edit the manuscript, and have it typeset (by hand, no less). Today, a writer who intends to approach a large U.S. publisher must do so through an agent. The agent’s job is to ferret out which editors might be interested in her clients’ books and pitch to them. Unless an editor happens to be exceptionally well-established at his or her house, however, s/he is not the only one who needs to approve a book’s acquisition: typically, the book will still go before an editorial committee. At that point, it’s the acquiring editor’s turn to be the advocate for the book s/he wants to publish — and that’s not always an easy task, because other editors will be fighting for their pet projects as well. Since a publishing house can only afford to bring out a very small number of books in any given marketing season, the battle for whose project will see print can become quite intense, and not necessarily only amongst the editors around the table. At a large publishing house, the marketing and legal departments might weigh in as well. If a manuscript makes it through the hurly-burly of the editorial committee, the editor will offer the writer a publication contract. (Actually, s/he will offer it to the writer’s agent, who will in turn discuss it with the author, but it amounts to the same thing.) Contractual terms vary widely, but at base, they will stipulate that in return for pocketing the lion’s share of the profits, the publisher would bear all of the production and promotional costs, as well as responsibility for getting the book onto bookstore shelves. In return, the author will agree to provide the manuscript for by a particular date (usually quite soon for a novel — which, please recall, is already completely written before the agent takes it to the editor) or as much as a year and a half later for a book proposal. If the editor wants changes, s/he will issue an editorial memo requesting them. Some of you just had a strong visceral reaction to the idea of being asked to alter your manuscript, didn’t you? If your heart rate went up by more than a third at the very suggestion, you might want to sit down, put your feet up, and sip a soothing beverage whilst perusing the next section. (Camomile tea might be a good choice.) Why? Because when an author signs a book contract, she’s agreeing to more than allowing the publisher to print the book. Such as… Control over the text itself While the author may negotiate over contested points, the editor will have final say over what will go into the finished book. The contract will say so. And no, in response to what you’re probably thinking: you’re almost certainly not going to be able to win an argument over whether something your editor wants changed will harm the artistic merit of the book. Sorry to be the one to break the bad news, but it’s better that you know the score going into the situation. Pretty much every first-time author faced with editorial demands has attempted to declare something along the lines of, “Hey, buddy, I’m the author of this work, and what you see on the page represents my artistic vision. Therefore, I refuse to revise in accordance with your <del datetime="2011-01-20T19:26:08+00:00">misguided</del> <del datetime="2011-01-20T19:26:08+00:00">boneheaded</del> <del datetime="2011-01-20T19:26:08+00:00">downright evil</del> suggestion. Oh, well, that’s that.” Or at least thought it very loudly indeed. That’s an argument that might conceivably work for a well-established, hugely marketable author, but as virtually all of those aforementioned first-time authors could tell you, no one, but no one, at a publishing house is going to find the “My art — my way!” argument particularly compelling. Or even original. Why? Well, remember my earlier quip about how publishing houses can only bring out a few titles in any book category per year, far, far more than their editors would like to bring to press? It’s never wise to issue a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum to people so well equipped with alternatives that they can easily afford to leave it. Especially if the issue in question is something as small as cutting your favorite paragraph. I’m telling you all this not to depress you — although it’s not all that difficult to imagine those last couple of paragraph having that effect — but so that you will not waste your energy and reputation on battling with your editor over every single requested change. Editorial control is built into the publishing process, after all; if you bring a book to successful publication, I can virtually guarantee that you will have to compromise on something. Learning to pick your battles, figuring out when give in gracefully and when to go to the mat, will serve both your interests and your book’s best in the long run. May I hear an amen? No? How about a few begrudging grunts of acknowledgment? Well, suit yourself, but if you found that last argument trying, you might want to find something to bite down upon before you read on. Why, you ask with trembling voice? Well, final say over the actual text and the ability to determine the timing of publication are not generally the only authorial rights one signs over via a publishing contract. A few matters that most first-time authors are stunned to learn that they cannot dictate for their own books: the typeface, the type of binding, the use of italics or special fonts, the number of illustrations, if any, when it will come out, and what the cover will look like. Also almost always beyond a first-time author’s ability to do anything about: the book’s title (that’s generally the marketing department’s call, believe it or not) and whether there is an acknowledgments page (the reason that they have become rarer in recent years is not that authors as a group have magically become less grateful, but that, like the dedication and epigraphs — those nifty quotes from other authors that often appear in published works — they take up extra page space, and thus render publishing a book more expensive). Hey, I’m just the messenger here. As a memoirist whose title was summarily changed by her publisher from something she expected to be changed (Is That You, Pumpkin?) to one that was bizarrely ungrammatical (A Family Darkly, a coy reference to A Scanner Darkly, which is in itself a reference to 1 Corinthians 13), believe me, my sympathies are squarely on the writers’ side on this one. (And no, Virginia, no employee of my former publishing house was ever able to explain to me with any degree of precision what they thought their preferred title meant.) The moral, should you care to know it: while landing a publication contract for a first book is certainly a coup, you’ll have a much, much happier life as a professional writer if you don’t expect it all to be one big literary luncheon where the glitterati congratulate you warmly on the beauty of your prose and the insight of your book’s worldview. It’s going to be hard work — for a crash course in just how hard many first-time authors find it, take a gander at the GETTING GOOD AT INCORPORATING FEEDBACK category on the archive list at right — and if you’re going to be successful at it, you’re going to need to come to terms with what you can and cannot control. Speaking of which… The hows and whens of book publishing Another matter that the publication contract will specify is the format in which the publisher will release the book — and no, it won’t be up to you whether your book will be released in hardcover or not. Historically, the author’s percentage has been higher for a hardcover book than for a paperback; until fairly recently, newspapers and magazines habitually reviewed only hardcovers for most novel categories, since that was the standard for high-quality fiction releases. In the last 15-20 years, however, fiction (and quite a bit of nonfiction, too) has increasingly been released in trade paper, those high-quality softcovers that so conveniently may be rolled and stuffed into a pocket or backpack, so the earlier review restriction has softened. That’s definitely good news for first-time novelists, as well as those of us who like to lug around several different books when we travel. Hey, a Kindle’s an electronic device — it has to be turned off for takeoff and landing. Once an editor has acquired a manuscript, it is assigned a place in the publisher’s print queue. In other words, they will tell the author when the book will actually be printed. Since much must happen between the time the editor receives a finished manuscript and when it goes to press, the contracted date by which the author must provide the book is typically months prior to the print date. This often comes as a great big surprise to a first-time author. If you wish to see your books published, though, you will have to come to terms with the fact that an author’s life is a hurry up/wait/hurry up/wait existence. The main manifestation of this: how long it takes for a major publisher to bring out a book. Although they sometimes will do a rush job to meet the demands of a current fad or news story, the typical minimum time between an author’s signing a book contract and the volume’s appearance in bookstores is at least a year. More often two. And that’s for fiction — which, as you will no doubt recall, is already written before the publisher has any contact with the book at all. For nonfiction, the time lapse is often substantially longer, in order to permit the author to write the book in question. So although one does indeed see books on current news stories hitting the shelves within a matter of weeks (the OJ Simpson trial, anyone?), that is most emphatically not the norm. A savvy writer takes this into account when constructing a narrative, avoiding references that might seem absolutely up-to-the-minute when he first types them, but will be as stale as last year’s fashions a year or two hence, when the book is finally available for readers to buy. I could go on and on about timing and control issues, but I’m seeing some raised hands out there. “Um, Anne?” the excellent folks attached to those hands ask timidly. “I don’t mean to seem shallow about my writing, but I notice that you haven’t said much about how and when an author actually gets paid for her work. Since I will have invested years of unpaid effort in writing a novel or perhaps months in constructing a marketable book proposal, is it unreasonable for me to wonder when I might start to see some tangible return on that investment?” Of course it isn’t. Let’s take a closer look at how and when a writer might conceivably start cashing in for those manuscripts and/or book proposals she’s written on spec. How authors get paid for their books An author who publishes through a large publisher is paid a pre-agreed proportion of the book’s sale price, known as a royalty. An advance against royalties (known colloquially just as an advance) is an up-front payment of a proportion of what the publisher expects the author’s percentage of the jacket price for the initial print run (i.e., the total number of books in the first edition). Thus, the more spectacularly the publisher expects the book to sell, the larger the advance. And because the advance is by definition an estimate of a number that no human being could predict with absolute accuracy, if the publisher’s estimate was too high, and thus the advance too large for the royalties to exceed, the author is seldom expected to pay back the advance if the book doesn’t sell well. However, once the book is released, the author does not receive further royalty payments until after her agreed-upon share of the books sold exceeds the amount of the advance. Since approximately 2/3rds of you just gasped audibly, let me repeat that last bit: the advance is not in addition to royalties, but a prepaid portion of them. An advance is not a signing bonus, as most people think, but a down payment toward what a publisher believes it will eventually owe the author. While your jaw is already dropped, let me hasten to add that royalties over and above the advance amount are usually not paid on an as-the-books-sell basis, which could entail the publisher’s cutting a check every other day, but at regularly-scheduled intervals. Once every six months is fairly standard. Don’t feel bad if you were previously unaware of how writers get paid; half the published authors I know were completely in the dark about that last point until their first books had been out for five months or so. Yet another moral: it behooves you to read your publication contract carefully. If you don’t understand what it says, ask your agent to explain it to you; it’s her job. Those hands just shot up again, didn’t they? “I’m glad you brought that up, Anne. You’ve made it clear why I would need an agent to help me though this process, which sounds like a drawn-out and somewhat unpredictable one. So how do I go about finding the paragon who will protect me and my work?” I’m glad you asked, hand-raisers. Many aspiring writers believe, mistakenly, that all that’s necessary for a book to get published is to write it. However, as any author whose first book came out within the last decade could tell you, bringing one’s writing to the publishing industry’s attention can be almost as much work as the composition process — and has been known to take just as long or longer. Again, sorry to be the one to break it to you, but it’s vital to a good writer’s happiness to understand that extended, frustrating, and difficult roads to publication are the norm for first books these days, not the exception. Clinging to the common writerly misconception that if writing is any good, it will always be picked up by the first or second agent who sees it, or that a manuscript that doesn’t find a publisher within the first few submissions must not be well-written, is a sure road to discouragement, if not outright depression. Certainly, it makes a writer more likely to give up after just a few rejections. Since the competition in the book market is fierce by the standards of any industry, realistic expectations are immensely helpful in equipping even the most gifted writer for the long haul. It can also be hugely beneficial in tracking down and working well with the helpful friend who will be toting your manuscript to publishers for you, your agent. So how does a writer go about acquiring this valuable assistant? Unless one happens to be intimate friends with a great many well-established authors, one has two options: verbally and in writing. But first, let’s talk about what an aspiring writer should NEVER do Querying and pitching are an aspiring writer’s only options for calling a US-based agent’s attention to his or her work. Picking up the phone and calling, stopping them on the street, or other informal means of approach are considered quite rude. Translation: they’re not going to work. Don’t even try. The same holds true for mailing or e-mailing a manuscript to an agent without asking first if s/he would like to see it, by the way. This is universally an instant-rejection offense. Unlike in the old days, simply sending to an agent who has never heard of you will only result in your work being rejected unread: uniformly, agencies reject pages they did not actually ask to see (known as unsolicited submissions). Is everyone clear on how to avoid seeming rude? Good. Let’s move on to the accepted courteous means of introducing yourself and your book. Approaching an agent in writing: the query letter The classic means of introducing one’s book to an agent is by sending a formal letter, known in the trade as a query. Contrary to popular belief, the query’s goal is not to convince an agent to represent the book in question — no agent is going to offer to represent a book or proposal before she’s read it — but to prompt the agent to ask the writer to send either the opening pages of the manuscript or the whole thing. After that, your good writing can speak for itself, right? Think of the query as your book’s personal ad, intended to pique an agent’s interest, not as the first date. Always limited to a single page in length, the query letter briefly presents the agent with the bare-bones information s/he will need in order to determine whether s/he wants to read any or all of the manuscript the writer is offering. This will be familiar to those of you who worked through my <a href="/index_p_11697.html">Querypalooza series</a> last fall, but for the benefit of all of you New Year’s resolvers new to the game, here’s a list of the information a good query should include: (1) Whether the book is fiction or nonfiction. You’d be surprised at how often queriers forget to mention which. (2) The book category. Basically, the part of the bookstore where the publishing book will occupy shelf space. Since no agent represents every kind of book, this information is essential: if an agent doesn’t have connections with editors who publish the type of book you’re querying, he’s not going to waste either your time or his by asking to see it. (For guidance on how to determine your book’s category, please see the aptly-named HOW TO FIGURE OUT YOUR BOOK’S CATEGORY listing on the archive list on the lower-right side of this page.) It’s also a good idea, but not strictly required, to point out who might be interested in reading your book and why; an agent is going to want to know that at some point, anyway. Of course, I’m not talking about boasting predictions like, “Oh, Random House would love this!” or “This is a natural for Oprah!” (you wouldn’t believe how often agents hear that last one) or sweeping generalizations like, “Every woman in America needs to read this book!” Instead, try describing it the way a marketing professional might: “This book will appeal to girls aged 13-16, because it deals with issues they face in their everyday lives. (For tips on figuring out who your book’s audience might be with this much specificity, please see the IDENTIFYING YOUR TARGET MARKET category at right.) (3) A one- or two-paragraph description of the book’s argument or plot. No need to summarize the entire plot here, merely the premise, but do make sure that the writing is vivid. For a novel or memoir, this paragraph should introduce the book’s protagonist, the main conflict or obstacles she faces, and what’s at stake if she does or does not overcome them. For a nonfiction book, this paragraph should present the central question the book addresses and suggest, briefly, how the book will address it. (4) The writer’s previous publishing credentials or awards, if any, and/or expertise that renders her an expert on the book’s topic. Although not necessarily indicative of the quality of a book’s writing, to an agent, these are some of your book’s selling points. For tips on figuring out what to include here, please see the YOUR BOOK’S SELLING POINTS category on the list at right. (5) Some indication of why the writer thinks the agent to whom the letter is addressed would be a good representative for the book. As I mentioned above, agents don’t represent books in general: they represent specific varieties. Since they so often receive queries from aspiring writers who are apparently sending exactly the same letter indiscriminately to every agent in the country, stating up front why you chose to pick THIS agent is an excellent idea. No need to indulge in gratuitous flattery: a simple since you so ably represented Book X or since you represent literary fiction (or whatever your book category is) will do. Should any of you have been considering querying every agent in the country, be warned: it’s a sure route to rejection, especially if a writer makes the mistake of addressing the letter not to a specific person, but Dear Agent. Trust me on this one. (6) The writer’s contact information. Another one that you might be astonished to learn is often omitted. Yet if the agent can’t get hold of you, she cannot possibly ask to you to send her your manuscript, can she? (7) A stamped, self-addressed envelope (SASE) for the agent’s reply. This isn’t part of the letter, strictly speaking, but it absolutely must be included in the envelope in which you send your query. No exceptions, not even if you tell the agent in the query that you would prefer to be contacted via e-mail. I’m serious about this: don’t forget to include it. Queries that arrive without SASEs are almost universally rejected unread. (For tips on the hows and whys of producing perfect SASEs, please see the SASE GUIDELINES category on the list at right.) Is there more to constructing a successful query letter than this? Naturally — since I’ve written extensively about querying (posts you will find under the perplexingly-named HOW TO WRITE A QUERY LETTER category on the archive list, if you’re interested) and how it should look (QUERY LETTERS ILLUSTRATED), the list above is not intended to be an exhaustive guide to how to write one. Speaking of realistic expectations, do not be disappointed if you do not receive an instantaneous response to your query. Because a well-established agent may receive 800 to 1500 queries per week (yes, you read that correctly), it’s not uncommon for a regularly mailed query not to hear back for a month or six weeks. Some agencies do not respond at all if the answer is no. So it’s just poor strategy to query agents one at a time. (For a fuller explanation, please see the QUERYING MULTIPLE AGENTS AT ONCE category at right.) Approaching an agent in writing, part II: the electronic or website-based query Because of the aforementioned slow turn-around times for queries sent via regular mail, increasing numbers of aspiring writers are choosing to send their query letters via e-mail. There are pros and cons to this — which I shall go over at length in a day or two, when I fulfill a reader request for a Formatpalooza take on the subject. Some agencies ask queriers fill out an electronic form that includes some or all of the information that’s in a traditional query letter. While some aspiring writers have landed agents in this manner, I tend to discourage this route, since typically, the word count allowed is sharply limited. (Some agency sites permit as few as 50 words for plot summaries, for instance.) Also, most writers just copy and paste material from their query letters into the boxes of these forms, substantially increasing the likelihood of cut-off words, missed punctuation, and formatting errors. If you just cringed, in recognition of how people who read manuscripts for a living tend to react to these types of tiny errors: congratulations. Your chances of querying successfully are substantially higher than someone who doesn’t know to conduct intense proofreading upon ANYTHING that’s s/he sends an agent. Remember, literally every sentence you send a potential agent is a sample of how good your writing is. Regardless of whether you choose to query electronically or via regular mail, it’s in your best interests to make sure that every syllable is impeccably presented. Which is why, in case you were wondering, written queries were the only means of approaching agents until just a few years ago, and still the means that most of them prefer. (Short of a personal introduction, of course. Writers whose college roommates or best friends from elementary school grew up to be agents enjoy an undeniable advantage in obtaining representation that the rest of us do not enjoy.) If a potential client has trouble expressing himself in writing, is ignorant of the basic rules of grammar, or is just plain inattentive to those itsy-bitsy details I mentioned above, a written query will tend to show it. To be fair, aspiring writers often prefer to query in writing, because that, after all, is presumably their strength. Besides, there are a lot of very talented but shy writers out there who would infinitely prefer to present their work from a distance, rather than in person. However, direct interaction with an agent is sometimes a plus. Approaching an agent verbally: the pitch A face-to-face presentation of a book concept to an agent is called a pitch, and it’s actually not indigenous to publishing: it’s borrowed from the movie industry. Screenwriters pitch their work verbally all the time. The reason that the publishing industry has been rather reluctant to follow suit is a corollary of the proof-is-in-the-pudding reason I mentioned above: not everyone who can talk about a book well can write one successfully, just as not every writer capable of producing magnificent prose is equally adept at describing it in conversation. However, since writers’ conferences often import agents to speak, many set up formal pitching sessions for attendees. Sometimes they charge extra for the privilege; sometimes it’s included in the conference fee. It’s also sometimes possible to buttonhole an agent after a seminar or in a hallway, but many conference organizers frown upon that. (Contrary to conference-circuit rumor, it’s typically the conference bigwigs who object to hallway pitching, not the attending agents. Virtually nobody objects to being approached politely immediately after a conference panel — and if they do, they simply say no and walk away. But no matter how much you want a particular agent to represent you, it’s NEVER considered acceptable to attempt to pitch in a conference or literary event’s bathroom. Don’t let me catch you doing it.) Like the query letter, the purpose of the pitch is not to convince the agent to sign a writer to a long-term representation contract on the spot, but to get the agent to ask the writer to mail him or her chapters of the book. (To engage in another parenthetical just-between-us chat: contrary to what conference brochures often imply, agents virtually never ask a pitcher to produce anything longer than a five-page writing sample on the spot. Since manuscripts are heavy, they almost universally prefer to have writers either mail or e-mail requested pages. I don’t know why conference organizers so often tell potential attendees otherwise.) In order to achieve that, you’re going to need to describe your book compellingly and in terms that will make sense to the business side of the industry. In essence, then, a pitch is a verbal query letter. Thus, it should contain the same information: whether it is fiction or nonfiction, the book category, the target audience, any writing credentials or experience you might have that might provide selling points for the book, and a BRIEF plot summary. Most conference organizers are adamant about the brief part: their guidelines will commonly specify that the summary portion should take no more than 2 minutes. Did I just hear all of you novelists out there gulp? You honestly do not have a lot of time here: scheduled pitch sessions may range in length anywhere from 2-15 minutes, but most are 5-10. Usually, they are one-on-one meetings in a cramped space where many other writers are noisily engaged in pitching to many other agents, not exactly an environment conducive to intimate chat. At some conferences, though, a number of writers will sit around a table with an agent, pitching one after the other. Yes, that’s right: as if this situation weren’t already stressful enough, you might have to be doing this in front of an audience. While the opportunity to spend telling a real, live agent about your book I’m going to be honest with you: the vast majority of aspiring writers find pitching absolutely terrifying, at least the first time they do it. Like writing a good query letter, constructing and delivering a strong pitch is not something any talented writer is magically born knowing how to do: it’s a learned skill. For some help in learning how to do it, please see the HOW TO PREPARE A PITCH category on the list at right. In case I’m being too subtle here: if you are looking for in-depth analysis on any of these subjects or step-by-step how-tos, try perusing the category list at right. Since I usually tackle these issues on a much more detail-oriented basis — a hazard of my calling, I’m afraid — I’m finding it quite interesting to paint the picture in these broad strokes. Next time, I shall talk a bit about what happens after a query or submission arrives at an agency — and perhaps use that as a segue into that aforementioned additional Formatpalooza post, by special reader request. The joint is going to be jumping here at Author! Author! Keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-402" class="post-402 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published category-agents category-book-publishing-basics category-book-reviews-and-how-they-work category-changing-nature-of-publishing category-dealing-with-fear-of-rejection category-editors category-everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-book-proposals-but-were-afraid-to-ask category-getting-a-book-published-basics category-how-do-manuscripts-get-published category-how-selling-nonfiction-is-different-from-selling-fiction category-how-the-publishing-industry-works-and-doesnt category-industry-terminology category-keeping-the-faith category-millicent-who-the-heck-is-millicent category-must-reads category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-realistic-expectations-for-writers category-rejection-when-they-dont-tell-you-at-all category-slush-piles-and-why-they-no-longer-exist category-unsolicited-submissions category-what-an-agent-will-expect-a-new-client-to-know-about-the-publishing-industry-a-crash-course category-why-do-i-need-an-agent category-your-next-book"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/18/the-all-you-can-eat-hopefulness-buffet-or-youre-already-sending-those-queries-out-again-arent-you-2/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2011-01-18T00:00:00+00:00">January 18, 2011</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/18/the-all-you-can-eat-hopefulness-buffet-or-youre-already-sending-those-queries-out-again-arent-you-2/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/#comments">8 Comments on The all-you-can-eat hopefulness buffet, or, you’re already sending those queries out again, aren’t you?</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/18/the-all-you-can-eat-hopefulness-buffet-or-youre-already-sending-those-queries-out-again-arent-you-2/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark">The all-you-can-eat hopefulness buffet, or, you’re already sending those queries out again, aren’t you?</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <a href="/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/EAT-sign.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/EAT-sign-1024x768.jpg" alt="" title="EAT sign" width="512" height="384" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-14215"/></a> I heard your jubilation in the wee hours, campers: at 12:01 this morning, those of you who had been holding your proverbial horses since November’s series on <a href="/index_p_13265.html">how to focus your querying list so you don’t waste your valuable time approaching agents who do not represent your type of writing</a> gave a giant whoop of joy and reached for your already-stamped SASEs. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day long weekend is now over, and starting this week, the annual tidal wave of New Year’s resolution queries and submissions will be starting to recede. Translation: a savvy writer may begin thinking about sending off those long-delayed queries and requested materials. Millicent the agency screener will now have time to consider them more carefully. For the benefit of those new to the perversities of Author! Author!, not so long ago — to be specific, on the first day of this very month — I gave some advice to eager New Year’s resolvers all over this great land of ours: <a href="/index_p_13992.html">hold off for a few weeks before you start querying and submitting again</a>. Why? Well, for a couple of excellent reasons, up to and including the fact that every year, thousands upon thousands of aspiring writers resolve that this year, by gum, they’re going to get that novel published. The results are clearly visible on the second mailing day after the New Year’s holiday: our old pal Millicent is up to her eyebrows in queries. It does not, to put it mildly, put her in the best of moods — and one does not need to be the Amazing Kreskin to guess whether a grumpy, overworked screener with 740 queries cluttering up her desk or in her e-mail inbox will be more or less inclined to reject at the sight of the first typo than a happy, well-rested one greeted by a mere 327 queries at the beginning of her workday. The same principle holds true, of course, for requested materials. As we’ve been discussing throughout our recent series of standard format for manuscripts (and don’t worry, e-queriers and submitters: there’s another Formatpalooza post in the offing especially for you), it’s Millicent’s job to be nit-picky and rejection-happy. If she weren’t, her boss — the agent for whom she screens queries and submissions — would end up spending so much time reading potential clients’ work that she would have no time to sell her existing clients’ books. You wouldn’t want that, would you? If you harbor aspirations of making a living as a writer of books, you shouldn’t. After all, reputable agents don’t stay in business by tracking down exciting new talent, at least not directly: they make their livings, and their clients’ as well, via placing works by already-signed authors. Believe me, once you are one of those authors, you will be grateful for this arrangement. Seriously, reading time is a scarce commodity for many a successful agent. Since those authors are constantly producing new manuscripts, and since the literary market is constantly changing, agents do indeed need to be reading constantly — but not necessarily submissions from would-be clients. Even the most literature-loving agents may devote only a small fraction of their time to scanning new writers’ manuscripts. Thus Millicent’s job security: the agent relies upon her to winnow out the overwhelming majority of queries and submissions, so that he may devote his scant reading time to only those most likely to catch his fancy. But that’s not how most writers trying to break into print think agencies work, is it? “But Anne,” aspiring writers everywhere mutter, “that’s appallingly cynical. Isn’t it the agent’s job — not to say responsibility, obligation, and/or glory — to ferret out the best and brightest of new talent? Isn’t it, in fact, his role in the literary world to discover brilliant undiscovered talent like me?” Actually, no, it isn’t. It’s his job to sell books by his existing client base, period. But don’t lose heart: you have the ever-malleable market to thank for his impulse to seek out new talent. What is selling today might well not be selling next week. So yes, that agent does need you. Or someone like you. Fortunately, around this time of year, Millicent is still getting upwards of 800 queries a week from your adorable ilk. I hear that undercurrent of grumbling out there: this deck seems a trifle stacked against those new to the game. Especially if, like the overwhelming majority of new queriers, you had previously believed that the guiding purpose of the literary agency as an institution was essentially charitable — to discover new writing talent and bring it, lovingly cradled, to an admiring public. If that last paragraph made your stomach drop to your knees, you’re not alone. Most new queriers and submitters are stunned to learn that the agency system is not set up primarily to discover them. It will save you a lot of heartache to learn how the process actually works, as well as what to expect. Not to mention to grasp how the publishing world has changed in the last twenty years: in 1990, there were roughly <a href="http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub103/appendix1.html">48,000 different books published in the United States</a>; last year, there were about 250,000. Starting to make sense that the agent of your dreams needs Millicent to do his preliminary reading for him? There are a heck of a lot of manuscripts floating around out there. So welcome, neophytes — and kudos to you for being smart enough to do your homework before you start boxing up your hopes and dreams and sending them off to strangers. Welcome, too, to those preparing to send out your next raft of queries or that long-delayed packet of requested materials, as well as all of you who are trying to work up nerve to start querying again after a painful rejection. And a big, hearty how-are-you-doing? to the many, many aspiring writers out there intent on finishing up a writing project while contemplating the challenge of landing an agent from out to the corners of their eyes. I’ve got a treat for you, wrapped in a bitter coating. Today, we’re going to talk about the history of writers just like you — and while we’re at it, debunk a few widely-believed myths. How books used to get published during the Taft administration, or, how a surprisingly high percentage of aspiring writers believe the industry still works A hundred years ago, the publication process was pretty straightforward: an author wrote a book, contacted an editor at a publishing house, and if the editor liked it, he (it was almost invariably a he) chatted about it with senior staff; if he could convince them to take a chance on the manuscript, he would edit it for publication. Printing presses were set in motion, and in due course, the book was available for sale. The publisher sent out advance copies to newspapers, so they could produce reviews. Of course, that was back when there were few enough books published in these United States that most releases from a good-sized publishing house could garner a review in a major newspaper or magazine. Think about it: in 1910, there were only <a href="http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub103/appendix1.html">13,470 book published</a>; assuming that a good newspaper ran its book review section once per week, and covered ten books each time, any given new release had about a 1 in 25 chance of getting reviewed. Even greater, if the subject matter had local interest. Now, so many books are published in any year that only a tiny fraction of them enjoy the substantial publicity of a newspaper or magazine review. Not only are there exponentially more new releases, but fewer and fewer print sources publish book reviews at all. Back to days of yore. Amazingly, considering that authors often possessed only one copy of their manuscripts — remember, the photocopier wasn’t invented until 1938, and it wasn’t commercially available until two decades later — it wasn’t uncommon for writers just to pack their books into boxes and send them to publishers without any preliminary correspondence. The result was what’s known in the biz as an unsolicited submission, but unlike today, when a manuscript that appears on an editor’s desk out of a clear blue sky is invariably rejected unread, publishers would set these books aside until some luckless employee of the publishing house had time to go through the stack. This ever-burgeoning source of reading material was known as the slush pile. Although solicited submissions (i.e., those that the editor has actually asked to see) have probably always enjoyed a competitive advantage, slush pile manuscripts did occasionally get discovered and published. They also, predictably, got lost on a fairly regular basis. Thus the old writerly truism: never send anyone the only copy of your manuscript. It’s still not bad advice, by the way. Hard disks do crash from time to time. Because there were fewer manuscripts (and publishing houses were more heavily staffed) before the advent of the personal computer, a writer did not need an agent: it was possible to deal directly with the acquiring editor, or at any rate with the luckless assistant whose job it was to go through the slush pile. But back when the hefty Taft was overseeing the nation’s business, it was also still completely permissible to submit a manuscript in longhand, too. Times change, as they say. One of the ways that time changed the publishing industry was that publishing houses began expecting to see fiction and nonfiction presented to them differently. The fiction/nonfiction split Both historically and now, novels were sold to publishers in pretty much the form you would expect: as complete manuscripts, and only as complete manuscripts. At least, they buy first novels that way; until fairly recently, the major publishing houses quite routinely offered fiction writers who had written promising first novels could snag a multi-book contract. It took until the 1990s for publishers to notice that a commercially successful first book is not necessarily an absolute predictor of whether the author’s second or third book will sell well. Or, to turn that around to the author’s perspective, that a book she had spent five or ten years perfecting might have been just a trifle more polished when it hit the shelves than one her publisher expected her to crank out in the year after her first book was released. While she was on a book tour, no less. As a result, while multi-book contracts still exist — particularly in YA and genre fiction, markets conducive to series — they have become substantially less common for fiction. While previously-published authors can occasionally sell subsequent books based upon only a few chapters (known, unsurprisingly, as a partial), novelists should expect to write books before they can sell them. Nonfiction, however, is typically sold not on the entire book, but via a marketing packet known as a book proposal. There are several hefty categories on the archive list at right on how to put one together, but for the purposes of this post, a generalization will suffice: a book proposal is a packet consisting of a description of the proposed book, a sample chapter, descriptions of subsequent chapters, and an array of marketing materials. Typically, these materials include everything from a detailed analysis of similar books already on the market to an explanation of who the target readership is and why this book will appeal to them to a marketing plan. Traditionally, previously published writers also include clippings of their earlier work. Basically, a book proposal is a job application: in effect, the writer is asking the publishing house to pay her to write the book she’s proposing. (For some guidance on how to put one of these intimidating packets together, check out the mysteriously-named HOW TO WRITE A BOOK PROPOSAL on the archive list conveniently located at the lower right-hand side of this very page.) That does not, however, mean that the writer will get paid up front, at least not entirely. Because buying something that does not exist obviously entails running the risk that the author may not deliver, the advance for a book sold in this manner is typically paid in three installments, one when the publication contract is signed, another after the editor has received and accepted the manuscript, and a third when the book actually comes out. Call it an insurance policy for authorial good behavior. Apparently, novelists are regarded as shiftier sorts, because to this day, the only acceptable proof that they can write a book is to have already written one. Everyone clear on the fiction/nonfiction distinction? Good. Let’s move on to one of the other great cosmic mysteries. The lingering demise of the slush pile Just to clear up any misconceptions floating around out there: if you want to sell a book to a major U.S. publisher in the current market, you will need an agent to do it for you. The slush pile is no more; currently, all of the major houses will accept only represented manuscripts. Like any broad-based policy, however, it comes with a few caveats. We’re only talking about the great big publishers here; there are plenty of smaller publishers that do accept direct submission. One hears tell of some children’s book divisions at major houses that still accept direct submissions; if an editor meets a writer at a conference and positively falls in love with his work, it’s not unheard-of for the editor to help the writer land an agent (usually one with whom the editor has worked recently) in order to side-step the policy. Stuff like that. But it’s not wise to assume that you’re going to be the exception. If you’re hoping for a contract with a big publisher, get an agent first. This was not always a prerequisite, of course. Until fairly recently, one element of that fiction/nonfiction split I was regaling you with above was that while novels had to go through an agent, nonfiction writers could submit proposals directly to publishers. Not so much anymore. You novelists out there are a bit restive, aren’t you? “But Anne,” I hear some of you complaining, and who could blame you? “This is starting to seem a trifle discriminatory against my ilk. NF writers are presenting substantially less writing than fiction writers; a proposal’s what, 40-60 pages, typically? As a novelist, I’m expected to produce an entire book. I would have thought that if publishing houses were going to distrust anybody enough to want an agent to vouch for ‘em, it would be the author whose book they were buying at the idea stage.” Don’t upset yourselves, oh novelists; it’s not good for your stomach acids, and besides, since everyone needs an agent now, it’s a moot point. But I suspect that the answer to your question is that that publishers habitually receive far more fiction submissions than nonfiction ones — interesting, given the long-standing industry truism that fiction is easier to sell, both to editors and to readers. (It probably also has something to do with the fact that nonfiction books are often proposed by those with clip-worthy previous publishing credentials, such as magazine articles and newspaper columns, but believe me, the other reason would be more than sufficient.) Before petty bickering begins to break out between fiction and nonfiction writers over a situation that has more or less vanished anyway, let’s turn our attention to a more absorbing topic: why would the big publishing houses feel so strongly about agents that they would all agree upon a represented-books-only policy? The rise of the agent Although many aspiring writers regard the necessity of procuring an agent as a necessary evil at best, agents perform an exceedingly important role in the current publishing market. Not only do they bring brilliant new writers and amazing new books to editors’ attention, but they are now also effectively the first-round submission screeners for the publishing houses. How so? By passing along only what they consider marketable and of publishable quality, agents thin the volume of submissions the publishers see on a monthly basis to Niagara Falls, rather than the Atlantic Ocean. In other words, they reject so the publishers don’t have to do so. It’s easy to resent agents for this, to think of them as the self-appointed gatekeepers of American literature, but that’s not really fair. Much of what they assure that the editors never see honestly isn’t publishable, after all; I hate to disillusion anyone (and yet here I am doing it), but as Millicent would be the first to tell you, a hefty majority of the writing currently being queried, proposed, and submitted is not very well written. Even very promisingly-written submissions are often misformatted, or would require major editing, or just plain are not quite up to professional standards. Or so runs the prevailing wisdom; we could debate for weeks over the extent to which that’s really true, or how difficult it often is for genuinely innovative writing to land an agent. Suffice it to say that if the major publishers believed that agents were rejecting manuscripts that their editors should be seeing, they presumably would change their policies about accepting only agented manuscripts, right? Think about it. You’re perfectly at liberty to continue to resent it, of course, but it will help you to understand the logic. “Okay, Anne,” I hear some of you reluctantly conceding, “I get that if I hope to sell my book to a major U.S. publisher, I’m going to need to find myself an agent. But if you don’t mind my asking, what do I get out of the exchange, other than a possible entrée to an editorial desk?” A good agent can do quite a bit for a writer. First, as you reluctant conceders already pointed out, an agent can make sure your manuscript or book proposal lands on the right desks: not just any old editor’s, but an editor with a successful track record in acquiring books like yours and shepherding them through the sometimes difficult publication process. Pulling that off requires both an intimate knowledge of who is looking to buy what right now – not always an easy task, considering how quickly publishing fads change and editorial staffs turn over — but also the connections to enable a successful pitch to the right audience. Again, think about it: for an agent to be good at his job, he can’t just send out submissions willy-nilly. He must have the experience to target the editors who are most likely to be interested in any given book. Agents also negotiate book contracts for their clients, act as a liaison between the author and the publishing house, and help mediate any disputes that might arise. Like, for instance, if the publishing house is being a mite slow in coughing up the contracted advance. Yes, it happens, I’m sorry to report. And if it happens to you, you’re going to want an experienced agent on your side, fighting for your dosh. Admittedly, it will be very much in your agent’s self-interest to make sure that you’re paid: in the U.S., reputable agents earn their livings solely from commissions (usually 15%) on their clients’ work. That means, of course, that if they don’t sell books, the agency doesn’t make any money. As we discussed above, agencies are seldom non-profit enterprises. Doesn’t it make sense that agents would not take on manuscripts that they do not believe they can sell in the current market, even if the writing happens to be very good indeed? Typically, the agent will handle all of the money an author makes on her book: the publisher pays advances and royalties to the agency, not directly to the author; the agency will then deduct the agent’s percentage, cut a check for the rest, and send it to the author. In the U.S., agencies are also responsible for providing their clients and the IRS with tax information and documentation. Since self-employed people like writers have been known to get audited from time to time, you’re going to want this level of verifiability. Trust me on this one. To recap: how things have changed since William Howard Taft roamed the earth Way back when: aspiring writers used to be able to approach editors at major publishing houses directly to market their books. The reality now: with few exceptions, a writer will require an agent to approach a publisher for her. Way back when: fiction and nonfiction books were marketed in the same manner, as already-completed manuscripts. The reality now: fiction is sold on the entire manuscript; with certain exceptions, nonfiction is sold as via a book proposal. Way back when: nonfiction writers could approach major publishing houses directly with their book proposals. The reality now: agents submit both fiction and nonfiction books on behalf of their authors. Way back when: agents played a substantially smaller role in the overall dynamic of U.S. publishing. The reality now: they largely determine which manuscripts editors will and will not see. Way back when: an author often formed a personal relationship with his editor and other publishing house staff, sometimes lasting decades. The reality now: the editor who acquires a book may not still be the editor handling it by the time it goes to press; a good agent can do a lot to help smooth over any resulting difficulties. Um, Anne, I was not laboring under the misconception that Taft was still president. Why are you telling me all of this while I’m gearing up to send out my next round of queries and/or submissions? An excellent question, campers, and one that fully deserves an answer: because all too often, even market-savvy queriers and submitters assume, wrongly, that the only conceivable reason their work might get rejected is the quality of the writing. If the manuscript were well-written, they reason, any agent in her right mind would snap it up right away, right? So if the first says no, they all will. These days, more than ever, that’s just not true. Agents specialize, market conditions change, and as any writer who has landed an agent within the past five years can tell you, whether a hundred agents have said no has no effect whatsoever on whether Agent 101 will say yes. It’s a matter of personal literary taste — and a thousand other factors. Translation: keep moving forward, in spite of rejection. The right agent for your work may well be out there, but if you don’t try to find her, she’s never going to find out that you’re the client of her dreams. Remember, the only manuscript that has no chance of getting published is the one that just sits in a desk drawer, gathering dust, because the writer doesn’t have the nerve to send it out. Again, that flies in the face of common writerly conceptions of how the next big talent gets discovered, doesn’t it? The fantasy runs a little something like this: if a writer is really talented, an agent would spontaneously appear on his doorstep the instant he finishes typing THE END and sign him to a long-term representation contract on the spot (and without reading the manuscript, apparently). By the end of the week, an editor at a major publishing house offers a million-dollar advance — and by the end of the month, the author is smiling at Oprah’s studio audience, saying, “Oh, it’s all been such a whirlwind.” Except that’s not how 249,980 of those 250,000 books got published in the United States last year. Most of the ones who ended up on Oprah were nonfiction writers, anyway, and not talking about their first books. That’s not going to make the starry-eyed writer of a genuinely good first novel feel less disappointed when only one of the fifteen agents she queried asks to see pages, though, is it? Or when the one who asks to see it doesn’t respond for three or four months, as is now quite common. Or even — brace yourself, dreamers — doesn’t respond at all if the answer is no. Nothing I mentioned in the last paragraph is any reflection whatsoever on the quality of the writing in the manuscript in question, right? It’s just how the process works these days. Realistic expectations might not be very sexy, but learning the basic contours of how real writers actually get their books into print will help you keep the faith through the long and often frustrating querying and submission process. And that, my friends, is the best way to get your manuscript published: not by waiting for lightning to strike you, but by bellying up to that buffet day after day, week after week, and, if necessary, year after year. Why? Because Taft isn’t president any more, and it’s a heck of a lot harder to sell a book to a publisher now. You don’t want to land just any agent; hold out for the one who can help you do it beautifully. Next time, I shall be talking a bit more about what happens to your query and submission after it lands on Millicent’s desk. Keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-4061" class="post-4061 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-dealing-with-rejection category-e-mailed-submissions category-e-mailing-queries category-first-pages-agents-tend-to-dislike category-format-troubleshooting category-formatpalooza category-formatting-a-book-manuscript-a-step-by-step-guide category-formatting-manuscripts category-how-to-format-a-book-manuscript category-keeping-the-faith category-manuscript-formatting-like-a-pro category-page-1-and-what-it-should-look-like category-proofreading category-punctuation-and-grammar-of-the-non-standard-variety category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-realistic-expectations-for-writers category-rejection-on-page-1 category-slug-line category-slug-lines-illustrated category-standard-format-basics category-standard-format-illustrated category-the-rules-of-book-formatting category-what-an-agent-will-expect-your-manuscript-to-look-like category-what-book-manuscripts-look-like category-why-are-there-so-many-different-sets-of-writing-rules-online"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/15/formatpalooza-part-xxiii-taking-the-guesswork-out-of-the-equation-or-are-we-11/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00">January 15, 2011</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/15/formatpalooza-part-xxiii-taking-the-guesswork-out-of-the-equation-or-are-we-11/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/#comments">13 Comments on Formatpalooza, part XXIII: taking the guesswork out of the equation — or are we?</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/15/formatpalooza-part-xxiii-taking-the-guesswork-out-of-the-equation-or-are-we-11/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark">Formatpalooza, part XXIII: taking the guesswork out of the equation — or are we?</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <a href="/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Zodiac_Wheel_sixth_century_mosaic.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Zodiac_Wheel_sixth_century_mosaic.jpg" alt="" title="Zodiac_Wheel_sixth_century_mosaic" width="511" height="519" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-14176"/></a> Once again, I had to laugh, campers: just as we were winding up this series on standard format for manuscripts — that’s book manuscripts and book proposals, mind you; if you are writing short stories, magazine articles, or for an academic journal, please seek out their specific requirements elsewhere — news sources all over North America suddenly began shouting that astronomers had determined that the astrological zodiac was off by about thirty degrees. That meant that instead of twelve signs, there were now thirteen, and most people were forcibly dragged into the sign before the one they had been used to reading in the newspaper. I assume you heard all of the noise about it. The only problem: <a href="http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/13/no-your-zodiac-sign-hasnt-changed/">it wasn’t true</a>. Now, this outcome probably was not all that surprising to those whose first response to the breaking story was, “Gee, isn’t astronomers declaring that the basic principles of astrology have changed rather like orthodontists deciding that everything we have previously known about lipstick application is misguided?” but unfortunately, in the rumor-based news market, under-researched reporting is not particularly rare. Even more unfortunately, the time-honored and honorable newspaper practice of printing retractions is not especially common in television media — and virtually unheard-of in Internet declarations. As those of you who have ever tried to look up information about submission format online are undoubtedly already aware, the result is a lingering mish-mash of the true, the partially true, and the blatantly false, mostly declared in identical tones of certainty, and all equally prone to generating a, “But I heard…” response. The underlying assumption is, and not entirely unreasonably, that each individual is now responsible for doing the necessary background research that reporters used routinely to provide. Hands up, everybody whose last ten Google searches involved any research whatsoever beyond typing in a keyword or two, hitting RETURN, and scrolling through the top ten or twenty hits. Realistically, although most surfers know that not everything posted online is true, busy lives dictate that they act as though it were. Case in point: the dizzying array of formatting, submission, and even grammatical advice floating around out there. I have nothing but sympathy for any poor aspiring writer whose first — or only — attempt to understand how new writing gets published in this fine country is gleaned from typing how to get published, literary agents, or even manuscript format into a search engine. Although I am fully aware that’s how some of you might have stumbled upon Author! Author!, the fact that I’m barraged on a daily basis by pleas from confused writers, begging me to reconcile what they read somewhere with what I’m suggesting, leads me to believe that while the Internet has in some ways made obtaining credible guidance for professional submission easier, in many respects, it’s harder than it was ten years ago. And that is indeed unfortunate, because, let’s face it, it’s also significantly harder for a new writer to land an agent than ten years ago. Not only is the competition greater, but the economic downturn and resulting contraction of the publishing industry has meant that at most agencies, more aspiring writers are competing for far fewer client slots. In a banner year, an agent might take on three or four new clients. In a lean year — or in what is expected to be a lean year — it might be even fewer. Let’s pause a moment, to allow the implications of that last statement to sink in fully. Although the overwhelming majority of submitters to agencies simply assume that the average agent will simply pick up any good writing that arrives on her doorstep, that’s always been a logistical impossibility; there are far, far too many good writers out there. Even the more sophisticated submitters, the ones who have done their homework sufficiently to understand that there is no such thing as a generalist agent, often operate on the assumption that the only factors playing into whether the agent of their dreams decides to offer to represent them or not are the quality of the writing in the manuscripts and their respective fit into their authors’ chosen book categories. In practice, that’s always been far from true. Ostensibly, it’s the agent’s job to be able to tell the difference between good writing in general, good writing in a selected book category, and good writing in a selected book category that could potentially interest an editor in the current book market. Any well-respected agent will receive literally thousands of queries and submission per year that fall into the first two groups — and hundreds that fall into the last. And if that doesn’t strike you as potentially problematic for even the best new writers in your chosen book category, I can only suggest that you go back and re-read the last three paragraphs. You might have missed something. As we discussed throughout the autumn of ‘Paloozas — don’t worry; we’ll be moving away from submission matters and back to craft next week — an agent has to consider many, many factors in deciding which dish out of the rich buffet of offerings to embrace as his next project. Quite a few of those factors are entirely outside the writer’s control: publishing trends, social movements, what’s being whispered around editorial water coolers these days, what any particular agent has just heard pitched recently at a literary conference. If your book category doesn’t happen to be hot right now, it is necessarily going to be harder to interest an agent in selling your book than if your category is rumored to be the next big thing. Some factors, however, lie completely within the writer’s hands. Whether the manuscript is presented in standard format, for instance, and whether the formatting is consistent. The typeface and size the writer chooses. The percentage of backstory included on page 1. Whether the story opens with conflict or with ordinary interaction. Whether all the phrasing on page 1 is original, or whether it is peppered with catchphrases. And so forth. Despite the consistent writers’ conference complaint, we writers honestly do make most of the decisions about our own manuscripts. That comes at a cost: agents, editors, and contest judges therefore have a right to assess our work not only on the writing, but also upon how well we adhere to the rules of standard format, grammar, punctuation, and the like. Was that giant sucking sound that just rocked the universe the sharp collective intake of breath by aspiring writers everywhere who hadn’t realized before that any or all of those matters could be rejection triggers all by themselves? Or was it merely the audible dismay of those of you who did not proofread your last e-mailed submission IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD before sending it off? I mention e-mailed queries and submissions advisedly, because their steep rise in popularity has presented its own problem. Whereas in years passed, agents, editors, and contest judges were only able to judge submission only upon what appeared on the printed page, now, they can see not only the presentation polish of a submission, but also how the writer got it to look that way. It is only reasonable, then, to expect Millicent the agency screener — who, after all, is employed specifically to reject the overwhelming majority of both queries and submissions before they get anywhere near the agent’s desk or computer screen — to take these matters seriously. While it has always been true that publishing types have associated incorrect grammar, punctuation, and even deviations from standard format with poor writing (an unfair correlation, perhaps, but a practically universal one), now that spell- and grammar-checkers are built into word processing programs and people like me yammer endlessly about proper manuscript format online, the tolerance for these gaffes has gone down, not up. Anyone see the problem with that happening while we’re all constantly being exposed to the effects of the Internet’s unique combination of widespread disregard of the rules of grammar and punctuation, most e-mail and blogging programs’ outright hostility to proper indentation (oh, you thought I LIKED writing this in business format?), and the tendency of online advice-givers to contradict one another? Anyone? Where these forces collide most harmfully for the aspiring writer is in the e-mailed or online submission. While a decade ago, an aspiring author who didn’t know to put the slug line in the header, but typed it at the top of each page of text, might have gotten past Millicent, in today’s online submission environment, his manuscript would be rejected by the top of page 2. Similarly, a writer could have gotten away with indenting each paragraph by hitting the space bar a certain number of times, as one would on a typewriter, whereas now, it’s immediately apparent to anyone looking at a soft copy submission that such a writer simply doesn’t know how to set tabs in Word. Already, I’m sensing hands shooting into the air out there, but hold your proverbial horses, please: not everyone may have gotten why precisely Millicent might conclude that a writer who made these mistakes might be a harder client for her boss to represent, and thus one to reject right off the bat. Consider, please, these two submission openings — and, as always, if you are having trouble seeing the particulars, try holding down the COMMAND key and hitting + to enlarge the image: <a href="/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/page-1-good-example.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/page-1-good-example.jpg" alt="" title="page 1 good example" width="508" height="640" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-14182"/></a> <a href="/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/got-there-wrong-example.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/got-there-wrong-example.jpg" alt="" title="got there wrong example" width="508" height="640" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-14183"/></a> Quick, tell me: what are the three major formatting differences between these two page 1s? Oh, you didn’t spot them? That’s not too terribly surprising — in a paper submission, Millicent probably would not have caught them, either. They look more or less identical, right? Had either you or Millicent been able to open the relevant Word file, however — as our Millie would have had to do in order to consider an e-mailed submission — you would instantly have noticed several serious problems. First, the slug line (Mini/The Good Example/1) is not located in the header, but typed laboriously at the top of each page. That would mean, in practice, that after virtually any revision, the slug lines would shift either lower on the page or backward onto the previous page, rendering the pagination useless. Second, and as a direct result, the chapter designation is on the third line of page 1, not line 1, where it should be. Third, both the chapter designation and the chapter title were hand-centered by the simple expedient of hitting the space bar repeatedly until the text was in the right place, as one would on a typewriter. Third, all of the indentation was done not by setting a tab, but by hitting the space bar 9 times at the beginning of each paragraph. “But Anne,” many of you cry out in protest, “why would it matter? Isn’t all that counts for standard format how the page looks?” Yes and no, dismayed protesters. Yes, for a hard-copy manuscript, looking right is sufficient. No, for a soft-copy manuscript, the words being in the right positions on the page is not enough to look professional. Why not? Well, ease of subsequent revision, mostly. Just as the page numbers would have to be changed by hand in the second version, using the typewriter-style centering would mean that if the title changed, the writer would have to refigure how many spaces to insert, rather than using the Center function (found on the FORMATTING PALETTE under the VIEW menu in Word) to recenter it automatically. And even on a typewriter, not setting a tab (easily done using the RULER function under the VIEW menu) for something that needs to be done at the beginning of each and every paragraph in the manuscript is, well, a trifle strange. If you found that last paragraph mystifying, may I make a simple suggestion that will make your life as a submitting writer far, far easier in the long run? Invest a few hours in taking a basic class on the functions of Word, because any agent or editor currently working in the United States will expect a new writer to be familiar with how it works. Unfortunately, this is not information you’re likely to be able to find in a 2-minute Google search. You’re going to want to take an actual class, so you can ask as many questions as you need in order to get comfortable with all the bells and whistles. Call your local computer store and ask; if you use a Mac, most Apple stores offer these tutorials for free. If you can’t find a class near you, try calling the local community college, asking to be directed to the Computer Science or English departments, and inquiring whether there is an advanced student who might like to make a few bucks by spending an hour or two showing you how to set up a document according to the rules of standard format. I would repeat the same advice, with different emphasis, to any aspiring writer unsure of the rules of punctuation and/or grammar. In the long run, one of the best things an aspiring writer can do to improve his chances of getting professional recognition is to invest the time in a good, basic grammar course. Heck, I’m a big fan of every writer taking a refresher course every five or ten years. I realize that this flies in the face of the web-based expectation of instant answers, and yes, I am always delighted to answer such questions here, especially as they relate to page formatting (<a href="/index_p_13964.html">the Formatpalooza post on punctuation in dialogue</a> was in response to a reader’s question, for instance). But at least for as long as my agent keeps insisting that now is not the right time to bring out Author! Author! in book form (a now that has extended for a good five years, only six months less than I’ve been blogging), I can’t be standing next to you while you are composing, can I? Trust me, both the writing and submission processes are significantly easier for an aspiring writer with a firm grasp of the rules of the language. If for no other reason than that those who are already conversant with how to use a semicolon correctly don’t have to waste hours upon hours wading through the widely divergent advice on the subject currently to be found online. This is, after all, a business in which both spelling and grammar count. Very much. I would even go so far as to say that being good at both are a job requirement for a professional writer. Like the strictures of standard format, however, grammar is not something that anyone is born knowing. The rules need to be learned, and applying them is a learned skill. Just as no aspiring baseball player would expect to hit a home run the first time she steps up to bat, neither should an aspiring writer cling to a misguided belief that if her writing is good enough, Millicent will overlook spelling, grammar, or punctuation problems. She won’t. Period. Less so now than ever, because these days, it’s widely believed in publishing circles that there is more than adequate training in such matters readily available on the web. Tell me, those of you who have gone looking for it, is that true? And if it is, how easy is it to tell a credible source from one that’s just winging it? The same perception dominates the publishing world about standard format for manuscripts, by the way. The last time I announced I was going to run through the rules of standard format again, an agent of my acquaintance, a tireless advocate for my giving up this blog in order to rechannel the considerable time and energy I devote to it into my other writing, even bet me a nickel that no one would even comment, much less ask questions, throughout my next foray into the subject. Despite my readers’ consistent devotion to improving both their writing skills and ability to present them professionally, he wagered that you would be so tired of formatting after my revisiting repeatedly it for five years that the posts that time around would pass relatively uncommented-upon. Actually, he didn’t suggest betting on it until after I stopped laughing at his contention. “What’s so funny?” he demanded. “It’s not as though your past posts on the subject aren’t well-marked, or as if there aren’t a million other sites on the web devoted to the subject. Why can’t readers just go there to find out what to do?” Because I like the guy and I’m not in the habit of lecturing agents, I restrained myself from suggesting that he just didn’t understand how a blog works. “Some will, but many of my readers don’t have the time to comb the archives.” (See? I honestly am aware of that.) “And the writers brand-new to the game may not yet know that there is a standard format at all. By going over it two or three times a year, I’m doing my part to make sure that everyone’s writing can look its best for you. You should be grateful.” He was, in a word, not. “Did you spend your last three lifetimes blithely violating the rules of grammar and structure, condemning yourself to the Sisyphean task of explaining them over and over again this time around? You’re dreaming, my friend — your readership doesn’t need this. I’ll bet you twenty bucks that you get fewer comments this time than last.” Well, great as my faith in my readers undoubtedly is, I seldom bet more than a nickel (although I did win a quarter off my mother during the last campaign season for accurately predicting the outcome of the Nevada senate race), so he had to settle for that. “You’ll see,” I told him. “Not only will readers comment more than usual, but they’ll come up with questions neither you nor I would have thought of addressing.” He handed over the nickel after <a href="/index_p_8570.html">Part III</a>. One of you lovely people asked a perfectly reasonable about indentation he’d never heard before. Better yet, one that had never occurred to him before. Now he is yet another convert to what I have long held is the truth about aspiring writers: contrary to practically universal opinion amongst professional readers, deviations from standard format are not usually the result of writers’ being too lazy to find out how to present a manuscript. Most of the aspiring writers I encounter are downright starved for accurate information on the subject; the underlying problem is that there isn’t enough authoritative information out there to combat all of the inaccurate rumors. I’ve always been a big proponent of agency websites simply posting a page with the formatting rules, if only so I could devote our shared time here to craft. Some do, but most don’t; virtually all that do simply assume that any aspiring writer serious about getting published will already be familiar with standard format. And that, in case those of you who have been hanging around Author! Author! for years have been wondering, is why I revisit the strictures of standard format at least twice per year. Call it my charitable contribution to the writing community. If you feel it has been helpful and you are reading this before 10 p.m. on Sunday, January 16, 2011, may I suggest that a delightful means of expressing that would be to take a couple of minutes to nominate Author! Author! for a <a href="http://2011.bloggi.es/">Bloggie Award</a>? The more nominations, the more likely the blog is to make it to the finalist round, and thus be read by judges. Again, I just mention. No pressure, of course. But I’d really like to see the stars line up right this year. Next time, we shall plunge head-first back into the rigors of craft. Keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-1505" class="post-1505 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-changing-nature-of-publishing category-dealing-with-fear-of-rejection category-dealing-with-rejection category-e-mailed-submissions category-e-mailing-queries category-getting-that-submission-out-the-door category-how-the-publishing-industry-works-and-doesnt category-keeping-the-faith category-must-reads category-new-years-resolutions-on-writing category-print-on-demand-pod category-querying category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-realistic-expectations-for-writers category-rejection-when-they-dont-tell-you-at-all category-self-rejecting-queries category-when-are-the-best-and-worst-times-to-query"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/01/the-dawning-of-a-new-day-or-a-word-of-advice-to-queriers-and-submitters-who-make-new-years-resolutions-3/query-letters-and-how-to-write-them-well/querying/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00">January 1, 2011</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/01/the-dawning-of-a-new-day-or-a-word-of-advice-to-queriers-and-submitters-who-make-new-years-resolutions-3/query-letters-and-how-to-write-them-well/querying/#comments">4 Comments on The dawning of a new day, or, a word of advice to queriers and submitters who make New Year’s resolutions</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2011/01/01/the-dawning-of-a-new-day-or-a-word-of-advice-to-queriers-and-submitters-who-make-new-years-resolutions-3/query-letters-and-how-to-write-them-well/querying/" rel="bookmark">The dawning of a new day, or, a word of advice to queriers and submitters who make New Year’s resolutions</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/change-of-day-on-the-beach.jpg" alt="change of day on the beach" title="change of day on the beach" width="512" height="307" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13994"/> Happy New Year, everybody! I’ve logged in bright and early on this very first day of 2011 neither to add another entry to our ongoing Formatpalooza series (although what could be a better way for an aspiring writer to start off a new year of querying and submitting than learning how to format a manuscript professionally?) nor to urge you to invest a bit of time in entering the <a href="/index_p_13946.html">Author! Author! Rings True Writing Competition</a> (ditto, and the deadline is a mere week away). No, I set finger to keyboard today in a last-ditch effort to talk you out of kicking off the year with a querying and submission mistake that literally millions of aspiring writers make every January 1. I’m referring, of course, to the formulation of New Year’s resolutions. Oh, there’s nothing wrong with making yourself a promise or two about writing more — or writing more often — in 2011 than you did in 2010. Or in committing yourself to finishing that book or book proposal you have been meaning to complete for eons now. In fact, that would be laudable: forming a practical, incremental plan to work toward a much-desired goal is a reasonable way to move toward it. But those are not the kind of New Year’s resolutions most aspiring writers make, are they? Here’s a pop quiz for those of you who spent some or all of the recent holiday season hobnobbing with kith and/or kin who happened to be aspiring writers: hands up if you bumped into at least one who confided that that her new year’s resolution was to get those long-delayed queries out the door, preferably within the first two weeks of January. Raise a hand, too, if a friendly soul astonished you by swearing that come January 1, that postponed-for-months submission was finally going to be making its way to the agent who requested it. Or that this was the year that novel was going to make its way out of that drawer and onto bookshelves everywhere. And don’t even dream of dropping those hands if you know — or are — a writer who is spending today, or this weekend, cranking out query letters so they can go out in Monday morning’s mail. Or sending e-mails to arrive even faster. Okay, legions with your hands in the air: keep ‘em up if you had ever heard these same writers make similar assertions before. Like, say, December of 2009, 2008, 2007, or any year before that. I’m guessing that very few of you dropped your hands. Why on earth do we writers do this to ourselves every year? The scourge of the New Year’s resolution, that’s why. Despite the fact that we’ve all spent our entire lives watching people make and break these resolutions, social conditioning encourages us to believe that it’s easier to begin a new project on January 1 — or at any rate, in January — than at any other point of the year. We buy this, even though our bodies tell us the opposite: not only are people exhausted from the holidays, but in January, not even the sun appears to interested in doing its job with any particular vim. Yet millions of aspiring writers all across North America are going to spend today, tomorrow, and the next few weeks rushing those queries into envelopes, hitting those SEND buttons, stuffing those requested materials into envelopes, and forcing themselves to sit in front of a keyboard at a particular time each day. Successful queriers and pitchers of months past will also be springing into action, feverishly printing out or e-mailing requested materials. And every single one of these fine people will feel downright virtuous while engaging in this flurry of feverish early January activity. Again: nothing wrong with that. The problem is, a good third of the aspiring writers in North America will be embracing precisely the same temporally-limited version of virtue. The predictable, inevitable, and strategically unfortunate result: for the first three weeks of January every year, agencies across the land are positively buried in paper. Which means, equally predictably, inevitably, and unfortunately, that a query or manuscript submitted right now stands a statistically higher chance of getting rejected than those submitted at other times of the year. So again, I ask: why do writers impose New Year’s resolutions on themselves that dictate sending out queries or submissions on the first Monday of January — instead of, say, the far more practical February 1? Oh, I completely understand the impulse to rush those queries out the door, especially for aspiring writers whose last spate of marketing was quite some time ago. Last January, for instance, immediately after their last set of New Year’s resolutions. I don’t say that to be judgmental: it can be genuinely difficult to work up the momentum to try, try again. Plenty of queriers and submitters take some time to lick their wounds after their last set of rejections — or, as is getting more and more common, their last round of sending out a query or even requested materials, waiting patiently, and just never hearing back. If a writer has pinned all of his hopes on a particular agent’s falling in love with his writing (or, in the case of a query, with his book concept; contrary to popular opinion, it’s logically impossible for a manuscript‘s writing style to get rejected by an agent who has seen nothing but a query letter), selecting an arbitrary date to pick himself up, dust himself off, and move on to the next agent on his list is not the worst of ideas. Although were I advising in any individual case, January 1 — or 3, since that’s the first business day of this year — would not be the day I would pick. Then, too, the holidays are actually quite a sensible time for even queriers who send out those letters like clockwork to take a breather. The NYC-based publishing industry more or less shuts down between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day; with so many of the fine people who work within it on vacation and/or celebrating various holidays, it just doesn’t make sense to query or submit then. Your missive might reach a Bob Cratchit working late on a holiday eve, but frankly, even ol’ Bob tends not to screen his e-mail very closely over the holidays. So I have nothing but sympathy for those of you who are trying to get back into the swing of querying and submitting. Just like every other kind of writing, it’s easier to maintain momentum if one is doing it on a regular basis than to ramp up again after a break. Just ask anyone who has taken six months off from querying: keeping half a dozen permanently in circulation requires substantially less effort than starting from scratch — or starting again. Blame it on the principle of inertia. As Sir Isaac Newton pointed out so long ago, an object at rest tends to remain at rest and one in motion tends to remain in motion unless some other force acts upon it. For an arrow flying through the air, the slowing force is gravity; for writers at holiday time, it’s often friends, relatives, and sundry other well-wishers. And throughout the rest of the year, it’s, well, life. But you’re having trouble paying attention to my ruminations on physics, aren’t you? Your mind keeps wandering back to my earlier boldfaced pronouncement like some poor, bruised ghost compulsively revisiting the site of its last living moment. “Um, Anne?” those of you about to sneak off to the post office, stacks of queries in hand, ask with quavering voices. “About that whole statistically more likely to be rejected thing — mind if I ask why that might be the case? Or, to vent my feelings a trifle more adequately, mind if I scream in terror, ‘How could a caring universe do this to me?’” An excellent question, oh nervous quaverers: why might the rejection rate tend to be higher at some times than others? To answer that question in depth, I invite you yourself in the trodden-down heels of our old pal Millicent, the agency screener, the fortunate soul charged with opening all of those query letters and giving a first read to requested materials, to weed out the ones that her boss the agent will not be interested in seeing, based upon pre-set criteria. At some agencies, a submission may even need to make it past two or three Millicents before it lands on the actual agent’s desk. Was that giant sucking sound I just heard an indication that some of you who are new to Author! Author! — perhaps reading it for the first time as the result of a New Year’s resolution to learn more about marketing your writing? — were unaware that typically, agents are not the ones screening queries — or even submissions? As nice as it might be for agents to cast their eyes over every query and submission personally, a successful agent simply doesn’t have the time. In order to get through the monumental volume of queries and make sure the agent has the time to read requested materials that have made it past the first cut, agencies employ professional readers like Millicent. That way, the agent can concentrate upon what actually supports the agency, selling already-signed clients’ work. If that seems like a cop-out, let’s get practical for a moment: a reasonably well-respected agent might receive in the neighborhood of 1200 queries in any given week — and you can triple or quadruple that this time of year. If Millicent’s boss wants to see even 1% of the manuscripts or book proposals being queried, that’s 10 partial or full manuscripts requested per week. Of those, perhaps one or two will make it to the agent. Why so few? Well, even very high-volume agencies don’t add all that many clients in any given year — particularly in times like these, when book sales are, to put it generously, slow. Since that reasonably well-respected agent will by definition already be representing clients — that’s how one garners respect in her biz, right? — she may be looking to pick up only 3 or 4 clients this year. Take nice, deep breaths, campers. That dizzy feeling will pass before you know it. Given the length of those odds, how likely is any given submission to make it? You do the math: 10 submissions per week x 52 weeks per year = 520 manuscripts. If the agent asks to see even the first 50 pages of each, that’s 26,000 pages of text. That’s a lot of reading — and that’s not even counting the tens of thousands of pages of queries they need to process as well, all long before the agent makes a penny off any of them, manuscripts from current clients, and everything an agent needs to read to keep up with what’s selling these days. See where a Millicent might come in handy to screen some of those pages for you? Or all of your queries? Millicent, then, has a rather different job than most submitters assume: she is charged with weeding out as many of those queries and submissions as possible, rather than (as the vast majority of aspiring writers assume) glancing over each and saying from time to time, “Oh, the writing here’s pretty good. Let’s represent this.” If she did that, her boss might end up with several hundred submissions to read in any given week. Clearly, that’s just not logistically possible. Fortunately for Millicent, most submissions, and definitely most queries, contain problems that render them fairly easy to reject — or have simply ended up in an agency that does not represent the kind of book in question. A good writer should be happy about that, actually. Since her desk is perpetually covered with queries and submissions, the more quickly she can decide which may be excluded immediately, the more time she may devote to those that deserve a close reading. Yes, I know that this is a lot for those of you brand-new to the process to absorb. Keep taking those nice, deep breaths. Given the imperative to plow through all of those queries and submissions with dispatch, is it a wonder that over time, she might develop some knee-jerk responses to certain very common problems that plague many a page 1? Or that she would gain a sense (or even be handed a list) of her boss’ pet peeves, so she may reject manuscripts that contain them right off the bat? As in on page 1 — which is where, incidentally, the vast majority of submissions get rejected — or within the first paragraph of a query letter? You don’t need to answer those questions, of course. They were rhetorical. (But if you’re new to this blog and are curious about common query, synopsis, and manuscript red flags, you might want to invest some time in going through the <a href="/index_p_11697.html">Querypalooza</a>, <a href="/index_p_12652.html">Synopsispalooza</a>, and <a href="/index_p_13616.html">Formatpalooza</a> series.) Now, the volume of queries and submissions conducive to this attitude arrive in a normal week. However, as long-term habitués of this blog are already no doubt already aware, certain times of the year see heavier volumes of both queries and submissions of long-requested materials than others. Far and away the most popular of all: just after New Year’s Day. Why, I was just talking about that, wasn’t I? That’s not entirely coincidental: this year, like every year, Millicent’s desk will be piled to the top of her cubicle walls with new mail for weeks, and her e-mail inbox will refill itself constantly like some mythical horn of plenty because — feel free to sing along at home — a hefty proportion of the aspiring writers of the English-speaking world have stared into mirrors on New Year’s eve and declared, “This year, I’m going to send out ten queries a week!” and/or “I’m going to get those materials that agent requested last July mailed on January 3!” Again, I have nothing against these quite laudable goals — although ten queries per week would be hard to maintain for many weeks on end, if an aspiring writer were targeting only agents who represented his type of book. (And everybody is aware that querying agents who don’t have a proven, recent track record of selling similar books is a waste of an aspiring writer’s valuable time, energy, and emotion, right? If not, you might want to take a gander at my recent <a href="/index_p_13265.html">How to Find Agents to Query series</a>.) My only concern is that you implement those goals in a manner that is likely to get the results you want, rather than merely leaving you discouraged before Martin Luther King, Jr., Day rolls around. Which is, incidentally, the fate of most New Year’s resolutions: the average one lasts less than three weeks. But let’s try to imagine what it would be like to be Millicent during those three weeks, before all of those poor revisers run out of steam. If you were a screener who walked into work, possibly a bit late and clutching a latte because it’s a cold morning, and found 700 queries instead of the usual 200, or 50 submissions rather than the usual 5, would you be more likely to implement those knee-jerk rejection criteria, or less? Uh-huh. Our Millicent’s readings tend to be just a touch crankier than usual this time of year. Do you really want to be one of the mob testing her patience? This is the primary reason, in case I had not made it clear enough over the last couple of months, that I annually and strenuously urge my readers NOT to query or submit during the first few weeks of any given year. Let Millie dig her way out from under that mountain of papers before she reads yours; she’ll be in a better mood. She’s particularly likely to be in a take-no-prisoners mood on Monday mornings, by the way — and not just for the reason that most people who work a Monday-Friday week are grumpy then. All weekend long, busy queriers and submitters have been toiling away like unusually dedicated aunts, filling her e-mail inbox to bursting with messages; regular mail also arrived on Saturday. So the next few Mondays — particularly the coming one, if she has been on vacation — will see her frantically trying to clear out that inbox and read through what’s on her desk as quickly as humanly possible. Again, do you think that will make her more likely to reject any individual query or submission in that pile, or less? For this reason, if you feel you absolutely must query or submit via e-mail during the next month, avoid doing it on either a Monday, Friday, or a weekend. Actually, that’s not a bad rule of thumb for e-querying and e-submitting in general: January is not the only time when most aspiring writers have more time on the weekends than mid-week. Some of you have had your hands in the air for the last three paragraphs, have you not? “But Anne,” those of you chomping at the bit ask eagerly, “if you’re advising me against taking action now, when can I reasonably begin querying or sending off that requested manuscript? Martin Luther King, Jr., Day? I have a long weekend then.” Well, that wouldn’t be a bad choice to start stamping those SASEs — although, like after holiday weekend, Millicent’s inbox will be stuffed to the proverbial gills on the morning of Tuesday, January 18. The average New Year’s resolution lasts about three weeks, so it would be fair to expect queries and submissions tend to drop off around then. Yes, that would make quite a bit of sense. So why am I urging every aspiring writer within the sound of my voice to hold off until February 1? Two reasons. First, over the past few years, the statistics about how many electronic readers and e-books sold over the holidays, vs. the number of traditionally-published books, have tended to come out around mid-January. (Oh, a few estimates will be available before then — there are probably some figures out now — but it usually takes a few weeks to verify the actual totals.) This year, the news is likely to depress folks who work in traditional publishing. Yes, even more than last year. As you may have heard, 2009 was the first year that <a href="http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1369429&highlight=">e-books outsold hard copies at Amazon on Christmas</a>. Those sales figures were just for Christmas Day itself, an occasion when, correct me if I’m wrong, folks who had just received a Kindle as a present might be slightly more likely to download books than, say, the day before. But that’s not what the headlines screamed immediately afterward, was it? I assure you, every agency and publishing house employee in North America has spent the intervening days fending off kith and kin helpfully showing him articles mournfully declaring that the physical book is on the endangered species list. Or ought to be. It was also the first year that there were roughly the same number of self-published and print-on-demand books published as those produced by traditional publishers. Admittedly, the average self-published book still sells less than a couple of hundred copies, but in terms of sheer volume, that was a hard blow to the publishing houses. My sources tell me that in 2010, three times as many books were self-published or produced via print-on-demand than by traditional U.S. publishing houses. It’s probably safe to assume that the mid-January statistics will not leave the denizens of agencies and publishing houses very happy. Or receiving any fewer calls from kith and kin, once again predicting the demise of the publishing industry. Now, naysayers have regularly predicted the imminent death of the publishing industry every year since the mid-19th century, but that doesn’t make it any easier to hear, does it? Tell me, if you were Millicent and kept hearing all of those harbingers of doom, how cheerful would you be when screening? She’s been hearing such dismal prognostications as often as the rest of us — and she’ll probably be hearing even more once those statistics come out. When she steps across the agency threshold the next day, too-hot latte clutched in her bemittened hand, the Millicent in the cubicle next to hers will be complaining about how his (hey, Millicents come in both sexes) kith and kin has been cheerfully informing him that he will be out of a job soon. So will half the people who work in the agency — including, as likely as not, Millicent’s boss. It’s only reasonable to expect, of course, that through the magic of group hypnosis, the more everyone repeats it, the more of a threat the news will seem; the scarier the threat, the more dire the predictions of the future of publishing will become. By lunchtime, half the office will be surreptitiously working on its resumes. Given the ambient mood in the office, do you really want yours to be the first query she reads that day? Or the fiftieth? Or would you rather that your precious book concept or manuscript didn’t fall beneath her critical eye until after everyone’s had a chance to calm down? There’s another yet reason that people who work in agencies tend to be a mite stressed in January: by law, US-based agencies must issue tax documentation on royalties by the end of the month. That won’t be Millicent’s department, but it might be her boss’ — it’s not at all unusual for one of the member agents at a good-sized agency to be entrusted with handling most or even all of the royalty paperwork. So can I guarantee that everyone at the agency of your dreams will be working away happily like the dwarves in Snow White by early February? Obviously, every agency is different, and I regret to say that I don’t have a crystal ball: there’s really no way of foretelling. Perhaps a freak bestseller will catch everyone by surprise — hey, it happens — or there might be an abrupt flurry of economic bad news. Publishing is very trend-dependent, you know. Aspiring writers who hang all of their hopes — and predicate their New Year’s resolutions — on the belief that the only factor determining whether an agent will pick up a book, or a publishing house will acquire it, is whether it is well-written are setting themselves up for disappointment. Plenty of other factors may well go into a rejection — up to and including Millicent’s simply having to plow through more queries than usual that week. In other words: try not to take it personally. But don’t query only one agency at a time, do your homework about who represents what — and maximize the probability of your query’s hitting Millicent’s desk at the right time by holding off until the beginning of February. By then, those of you who each year stubbornly reject my annual admonition to eschew writing-related New Year’s resolutions will have had a nice, long chunk of time to see if you could, say, up your writing time by an extra hour per week. Or per day. Or prepared a contest entry for that literary contest you’d always meant to enter. Far be it from me to discourage keeping that kind of resolution, whether you choose to put it into action on New Year’s Day, the fourth of July, or St. Swithin’s day. Only please, for your own sake, don’t set the bar so high that you end up abandoning it within just a couple of weeks. Doesn’t your writing deserve a more consistent effort? Or at least some recognition that pumping up the nerve to bundle up your baby and hand it to someone who has a professional obligation to judge it is one of the hardest, scariest endeavors a person can embrace? Be proud of yourself for being ready and able to do it — believe me, only a very small percentage of aspiring writers ever work up that nerve. You’d be astonished by how many successful queriers and pitchers never submit the requested materials. This is hard stuff; the writing part is only the beginning. But you can do it — if you go about it in a reasonable manner. Don’t be one of the millions of New Year’s resolvers who starts out in a glow of good intentions, only to be feeling weak-willed three weeks hence because the resolution was simply too big. Or too much of a commitment to maintain for longer than just a few weeks. If you must make a New Year’s resolution, resolve to set an achievable goal, one that you can pull off without burning yourself out quickly. In the long term, asking yourself to write two extra hours per week is more likely to become a habit than eight or ten; committing to sending out one query per week is much easier to do consistently than twenty. Remember, if Millicent resolved to get through those masses of queries and submissions currently completely concealing her desk from the human eye, she’d fling her latte in disgust within the first hour. Steady, consistent application is the way to plow through an overwhelming-seeming task. Okay, if I’m sounding like Aesop, it’s definitely time to sign off. Next time, I shall be talking about the ins and outs of formatting nonfiction proposals — but if you have more general manuscript formatting questions, please keep posting them in the comments. I’m far from done talking about how to get the best out of a manuscript. Just let me get all of these New Year’s resolutions out of the way first. Keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-4054" class="post-4054 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-business-format-vs-indented-paragraphs category-contest-judging-criteria category-e-mailed-submissions category-e-mailing-queries category-format-troubleshooting category-formatpalooza category-formatting-a-book-manuscript-a-step-by-step-guide category-formatting-manuscripts category-how-to-format-a-book-manuscript category-page-2-and-thereafter category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-standard-format-illustrated category-the-rules-of-book-formatting category-what-an-agent-will-expect-your-manuscript-to-look-like category-what-book-manuscripts-look-like"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/12/16/formatpalooza-part-xi-setting-some-boundaries-or-wait-millicent-why-have-you-stopped-reading-3/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2010-12-16T00:00:00+00:00">December 16, 2010</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/12/16/formatpalooza-part-xi-setting-some-boundaries-or-wait-millicent-why-have-you-stopped-reading-3/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/#comments">6 Comments on Formatpalooza, part XI: setting some boundaries, or, wait, Millicent — why have you stopped reading?</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/12/16/formatpalooza-part-xi-setting-some-boundaries-or-wait-millicent-why-have-you-stopped-reading-3/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark">Formatpalooza, part XI: setting some boundaries, or, wait, Millicent — why have you stopped reading?</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Carcassone-outer-wall-1024x768.jpg" alt="Carcassone outer wall" title="Carcassone outer wall" width="512" height="384" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-13815"/> Have you been enjoying our in-depth guided tour of the manuscript from the top down? Not gone tumbling down any parapets, have we> No, that’s not just some clumsy publishing-world metaphor. So far, we’ve talked about the piece of paper on top of the submission stack, the title page; we’ve talked about the next sheet of paper, the first page of text and how it differs from both the title page and the pages that come after it; we’ve extrapolated from that first page to standards for the first page of each chapter and any titled section breaks. Now, it’s time to talk about all of those pages in the middle Perhaps, while we’re at it, we could engage in some more of those nifty compare-and-contrast exercises we engaged in so fruitfully last time. Hard to contain your enthusiasm within reasonable boundaries, isn’t it? Okay, so it’s not a particularly sexy topic, but it’s a really, really good idea for an aspiring writer to devote some serious time to comparing properly and improperly formatted manuscripts. Writing time is precious for all of us — and scarce for most of us — and school compare-and-contrast exercises left most graduates with but think of it as an investment in your writing career: once you’re learned to spot formatting problems easily, you’ll be a much, much more effective proofreader. Not to mention being able to format your manuscripts correctly from the get-go. Oh, that doesn’t sound like much of a door prize to you? Just wait until you’re trying madly to pull a submission packet together overnight in response to a request for materials, or frantically constructing a contest entry four hours before it needs to be postmarked. Or, even more stressfully marvelous, responding to a last-minute revision request from the editor who had originally told you that manuscript had been accepted as complete. Believe me, when any of those stressful-but-happy days come, you’ll be very grateful then for every nanosecond that you don’t have to squander on wondering if your margins are consistent. Because they had better be: believe me, our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, is very quick to discern the difference between a professionally-formatted manuscript and, well, everything else. At the end of a long day’s reading, they definitely jump out at her, and with good reason: once a professional reader gets used to seeing the similarities that pretty much all professional manuscripts share, submissions formatted in other ways might as well have UNPROFESSIONAL stamped on them in bright red ink. And while Millicent, bless her literature-loving soul. may strive valiantly not to allow that impression to color her reading of the submission itself, it’s just not a good idea to assume that it won’t. She’s only human, after all. It’s an even worse idea to assume a charitable reading for a contest entry, by the way. If anything, contest judges tend to be even more sensitive to the beauty of standard format than Millicent, for the simple reason that they’ve usually been reading a whole lot longer. The agency gig may well be Millie’s first job out of college, but the judge handed your entry may well have just retired from a long and fruitful career teaching English composition. I don’t want to frighten any of you out of entering literary contests, but her fingers positively ache for the red pen of correction. This is not entirely accidental — most well-respected contests require some professional credentials from their judges, either as writers, editors, or teachers. Which means, in practice, that judges have often been writing in standard format themselves for years or bludgeoning other writers into compliance with its requirements. Translation: non-standard formatting won’t look right to them, either. By now, you’re having a similar reaction, aren’t you? Don’t think you’ve been developing professional eyes throughout this autumn of ‘Paloozas? Or don’t want to believe you could conceivably share any traits with Millicent? Let’s test the proposition by trying a little Aphra Behn on for size. If you don’t know her work, you should, at least historically: as far as we know, she was the first woman paid for writing in English — which, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, means that every female writer who earns so much as a sou from it now should be laying wreaths on her grave in gratitude. Our girl Aphra’s also hilarious — and if you think it’s easy for a joke written in 1688 to remain funny today, well, I look forward to reading your comedic stylings in the year 2332. Don’t believe me? Slip your tootsies into Millicent’s moccasins and consider the following page from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fair-Jilt-Aphra-Behn/dp/1427045119/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1292564765&sr=1-3">THE FAIR JILT</a>. (As always, if you’re having trouble reading the small writing, enlarge the image by holding down the COMMAND key and pressing +.) I defy you not to be too distracted by the story to notice how the page is put together. Seriously, try not to think at all about the fact that Millicent probably would not even start to read this version. Don’t worry your pretty little head over why. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/the-fair-jilt-wrong.jpg" alt="the fair jilt wrong" title="the fair jilt wrong" width="466" height="603" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13820"/> You clever souls could tell instantly that there was something wrong here, couldn’t you, and not just because Miranda’s trying to seduce her priest? (For convent, read monastery.) Set aside Aphra’s practically Dickensian affection for semicolons for the moment — which would tend to turn off a modern Millicent pretty quickly — and let’s ponder why this page almost certainly would not get a fair reading in a present-day agency. Before you commit yourself irrevocably, here’s what it should have looked like in standard format: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Aphra-Behn-right.jpg" alt="Aphra Behn right" title="Aphra Behn right" width="466" height="603" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13831"/> Quick, tell me: what’s the reason our Millie would not bother to start reading the first page 10, but would read the second? If you flung your hand into the air and shouted, “The 10-point type, Anne! It will strain her already overworked eyes,” pat yourself on the back 47 times. If you also added, “And the Ariel typeface probably didn’t help here, either,” make that 48. Why is the first in particular almost always a deal-breaker? She’s used to seeing every manuscript heading out of the agency to publishing houses in 12-point Times New Roman, so that first example — feel free to chant it with me here, ‘Palooza followers — it just doesn’t look right. And why should she waste her time with that tiny type? She absolutely could not forward it to her boss that way; agents are susceptible to eye strain, too. But those unfortunate cosmetic choices are not the only problems with the first version, are they? Let’s turn our magnifying glasses to the top of the page: the incorrect version does not have a proper slug line. Seeing this lone page out of context, it’s quite obvious why a slug line is a dandy idea, isn’t it? Without it, how would it be even remotely possible to return this wandering page back into the manuscript from whence it came. “Who wrote this?” Millicent cries in ire, glaring around her cubicle at the 47 manuscripts lying there. “This stray piece of paper could be from any of these!” At least Ms. Behn thought to number the pages of Example #1 — but did you catch the problem with how she did it? The page number is in the bottom right-hand margin, rather than in the slug line, where it belongs. And it’s so far down in the footer that the number got caught off halfway during printing. Did you catch any other problems that might register on Millicent’s umbrage meter? What about that right margin? Mighty straight, isn’t it? That look proper to you? What’s going on here is called block-justification, another problem that can be laid squarely at the feet of those who insist that a manuscript and a published book should be identical. The text in many published books, and certainly in many magazines and newspapers, is spaced so that each line begins at exactly the same distance from the left-hand edge of the page and ends (unless it’s the last line of a paragraph) at exactly the same distance from the right-hand edge of the page. Why would this species of neatness bug the heck out of professional readers? A very practical reason indeed: it renders skimming quite a bit more difficult. Why? Well, block formatting provides fewer landmarks, as it were, to the glancing eye, As you may see for yourself, Practically every line of narrative text resembles every other. To those of us used to the ragged right margins and even letter spacing of standard format, it’s actually kind of hard to read. So there’s quite a bit in Example #1 that’s distracting from the actual writing, isn’t there? Doesn’t help sell the text, does it? Okay, all of these rhetorical questions in a row are beginning to make me dizzy, so let’s move on to Example #2, the one Millicent and a contest judge would like. To save your weary fingertips a modicum of scrolling (hey, I do what I can), here it is again: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Aphra-Behn-right.jpg" alt="Aphra Behn right" title="Aphra Behn right" width="466" height="603" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13831"/> Now, let’s take a gander at the same page in — ugh — business format; if you don’t know why it’s ugh-worthy, you might want to revisit <a href="/index_p_8570.html">my earlier post on the immense value of indentation</a>. <a href="/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/aphra-behn-business.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/aphra-behn-business.jpg" alt="" title="aphra-behn-business" width="466" height="603" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1230"/></a> Startlingly different, isn’t it, considering that I made a grand total of two formatting changes? You did catch both of them on your skim through, right? All I did was I eliminate the indentations at the beginning of each paragraph and skipped a line between paragraphs to produce the norm for business correspondence, as well as for most of the text currently posted on the Internet. (Including this blog, unfortunately. As a professional writer and reader of manuscripts, it drives me nuts that my blogging program won’t allow me to indent paragraphs like a literate human being.) Again, why is Millicent unlikely even to start reading that last rendition of page 10? Because — wait for it — it just doesn’t look right. In fact, in both submissions and contest entries, business format is often grounds all by itself for knocking a manuscript out of finalist consideration. Finding yourself asking why again? Well, technically, indented paragraphs are grammatically requisite, so to a judge, non-indented paragraphs may well seem as great a violation of everything we hold dear as frequent misspellings or use of the wrong form of there, their, and they’re. (Since not all of you laughed, allow me to beg you nervously: please tell me that some English teacher took the time to teach you the rules governing there, their, and they’re. We all see them used incorrectly so often nowadays that I shall not rest easy until I am positive that each and every one of you is aware that there refers to a place, their means belonging to them, and they’re is a contraction for they are. While I’m at it, I’d also like to point out that that it’s is a contraction for it is, whereas its means belonging to it. Thank you for humoring me; time to get back to the post already in progress.) Fortunately for judges and Millicents who care deeply about the health of the language, errors seldom come singly in entries and submissions. Like spelling errors, formatting mistakes are apparently social: they like to travel in packs, roving all over a manuscript like Visigoths sacking Rome. As a result of this convenient submission phenomenon, a manuscript that contains errors within the first few lines (or on the first page) is easy for a professional reader to dismiss; statistically speaking, it’s a pretty good bet that if Millicent kept reading the pages following a technically flawed opening, she would find more causes for umbrage. Given how many submissions she has to screen between now and lunch, do you think she is going to (a) press on in the hope that the first error was a fluke, or (b) leap to the (perhaps unwarranted) assumption that there is more of the same to come and reject it right away? I leave that one to your fine critical faculties to answer. Let’s just say that her umbrage-taking threshold tends to be on the low side, especially immediately after she has taken a sip from that too-hot latte that always seems to be by her side when we are watching her in action. (Let it cool next time, okay, Millie?) Why am I bringing this up in the middle of a discussion of the perils of business format? Well, for starters, an ever-increasing number of agents are not only accepting e-mailed queries (a genuine rarity until quite recently), including some who ask queriers to include the opening pages, a synopsis, and/or other writing samples with their queries. Since few agents open attachments from writers with whom they’ve had no previous contact, many request that those opening pages be included in the body of the e-mail, pasted just below the letter. Sense a potential problem barreling in our general direction? That’s right: most e-mail programs are not set up for easy tabbing; consequently, business format is the norm for e-mail communications. But that doesn’t mean that the Millicent assigned to screen those queries won’t turn up her nose at non-indented paragraphs in those pages. Again, why? Are you sitting down, dislikers of indentation? I hate to be the one to break this to you, but there are Millicents out there — and agents, editors, contest judges, and literate people everywhere — who will leap directly from noting a lack of indentation and unwarranted spaces between paragraphs to our old friend, option (b): if the submitter is not aware of how to format a paragraph of English prose properly, she reasons, aren’t there inevitably more snafus to come? Now, not every Millicent — or agent, judge, etc. — will have this knee-jerk reaction, of course. But do you really want to take the chance that she’s not going to seize the opportunity to save herself a little time? The specter of illiteracy is not the only reason using business format is likely to cost you, either. To a professional reader, the differences between the last two examples would be more than visually jarring — they’d be downright confusing. In standard format, the only reason for a skipped line between paragraphs would be a section break, so Millicent would be expecting the second paragraph to be about something new. Okay, so a misconception like that might distract her attention for only few consecutive seconds, but let’s not kid ourselves: your garden-variety Millicent is spending less than a minute on most of the submissions she rejects — it’s actually not all that uncommon for her not to make into the second or third paragraph before reaching for the SASE and a copy of that annoying form rejection letter. Take a moment for the implications to sink fully into your overtaxed brainpan. Don’t worry; I’ll wait. While those of you new to the speed with which rejection typically occurs are already in shock, let me add for the sake of anyone who doesn’t already know: those who regard business format as a symptom of creeping illiteracy — hey, I just report the news; I don’t dictate it — are every bit as likely to frown upon it just as much in a query letter or synopsis as in a manuscript submission. Time loss is not the only reason she might take umbrage at momentary confusion. Let me let you in on a little secret: professional readers, especially those who inhabit agencies and publishing houses, tend not to be overly fond of having their mental image of the story they are reading at the moment jarred. How do I know this? Well, for one thing, they commonly refer to it as being tricked. As in, “I hate being tricked by a first paragraph that is about someone other than the protagonist.” There’s a practical basis to this dislike, but it’s kind of complicated. I wrote a couple of fairly extensive posts on the subject a while back (here’s a link to <a href="/index_p_332.html">the first</a>, and here’s a link to <a href="/index_p_335.html">the second</a>, in case you’re interested), but I’ll run over the thumbnail version now. Is everybody comfortably seated? My thumbnails are a tad long. (Just try to get THAT image out of your head anytime soon.) To get through all of the submissions she’s assigned to screen each week, Millicent has to read quite quickly, right? If she doesn’t, she’ll get buried in paper, as basically, she’s got to make it through WAR AND PEACE several times over before she toddles wearily homeward on Friday afternoon. That’s a whole lot of material to remember, by anyone’s standards — and remembering actually is important here. If she decides to allow a manuscript to make it to the next level of consideration, she is going to need to be able to tell her boss what the book is about: who the protagonist is, what the conflict is, why that conflict is important enough to the protagonist for the reader to be drawn into it, and so forth. In essence, she’s going to need to be able to pitch it to the higher-ups at the agency, just as the agent is going to have to do in order to sell the book to an editor, and an editor is going to have to do in order to convince his higher-ups that the publishing house should acquire the book. And, often, as first-round contest judges will need to do on an evaluation form in order to pass an entry onto the next round. Okay, brace yourself, because explaining what comes next involves delving into one of the great cosmic mysteries that has long perplexed aspiring writers the world over. It’s not for the faint of heart. Remember earlier in thus series, when I mentioned that agents and editors don’t read like other people? Well, one of the primary differences is that from line one of page one, they’re already imagining how they’re going to pitch this book. So if paragraph 2 or 3 (or page 2 or 3) suddenly informs them that their mental patter has been about the wrong character, they feel as if they’ve been backing the wrong horse. And while there may have been any number of perfectly reasonable narrative reasons for the text to concentrate upon an alternate character for the opening, unless the writing and the story have already really wowed Millicent, her resentment about being <del datetime="2008-08-14T00:21:46+00:00">tricked</del> <del datetime="2010-12-17T06:11:20+00:00">actively misled</del> mistaken about the identity of the protagonist is often sufficient to make her reach for that SASE and form letter. Feel free to go scream into the nearest pillow over that last piece of convoluted logic; you don’t want to keep that kind of existential cri de coeur pent up inside. I’ll wait until it’s out of your system. Feel better? Good. Before you go rushing off to see if your opening paragraphs might possibly be laying you open to a charge of trickery — because, for instance, you might have taken the bold authorial step of noticing that there is more than one human being in the world, and written about an interpersonal relationship accordingly — let’s return to the formatting issue that prompted my little segue into the psychology of resentment. Can we extrapolate any practical lesson about business format from it? You bet your boots we can: it’s not a good idea to give the impression of a section break where there isn’t one. And when producing pages for people who read all day, you might want to stick to the rules governing written English and indent your paragraphs. Starting to feel more at home with standard format? Excellent; my <del datetime="2010-02-25T08:40:10+00:00">evil plan</del> <del datetime="2010-02-25T08:40:10+00:00">plot for world domination</del> teaching strategy is working. Keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-4217" class="post-4217 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-contest-entry-bugbears category-contest-entry-prep category-format-troubleshooting category-formatpalooza category-formatting-manuscripts category-how-can-i-choose-between-competing-advice category-how-to-format-a-book-manuscript-just-the-facts category-if-you-read-only-one-post-on-author-author-this-should-be-it category-must-reads category-numbers-in-manuscripts category-punctuation-and-grammar-of-the-non-standard-variety category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-standard-format-basics category-submission-troubleshooting category-the-great-one-space-two-space-debate category-the-manuscript-formatting-rules category-the-rules-of-book-formatting category-what-an-agent-will-expect-your-manuscript-to-look-like category-why-are-there-so-many-different-sets-of-writing-rules-online"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/12/07/formatpalooza-part-iv-drawing-some-much-needed-lines-in-the-sand-7/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2010-12-07T00:00:00+00:00">December 7, 2010</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/12/07/formatpalooza-part-iv-drawing-some-much-needed-lines-in-the-sand-7/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/#comments">9 Comments on Formatpalooza, part IV: drawing some much-needed lines in the sand</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/12/07/formatpalooza-part-iv-drawing-some-much-needed-lines-in-the-sand-7/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark">Formatpalooza, part IV: drawing some much-needed lines in the sand</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/lines-in-the-sand.jpg" alt="lines in the sand" title="lines in the sand" width="512" height="573" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13669"/> Before we begin today, a heads-up about a long-time member of the Author! Author! community’s exciting new project: tonight at 7 and 10 EST is the premiere of memoirist, blogger, and all-around fab guy<a href="http://www.joelderfner.com/">Joel Derfner</a>‘s new reality show, <a href="http://www.sundancechannel.com/girls-who-like-boys-who-like-boys/">Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys</a> on the Sundance Channel. Best of luck, Joel, and may the film editors be kind to you! Those of you who have been hanging out here for a while may know Joel better under his commenting/blogging moniker, <a href="http://www.joelderfner.com/blog/">Faustus, M.D.</a>. Or for his informative and funny guest blogs on <a href="/index_p_1053.html">getting permission to use song lyrics in one’s books</a> (oh, yes, Virginia, explicit permission is required, unless the song is in the public domain) and <a href="/index_p_4802.html">how much input an author does and doesn’t get on his book covers</a>. Or perhaps the name rings a bell because I have regularly been heard to say over the last couple of years that his memoir, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Swish-Become-Gayest-Happening-Instead/dp/0767924312/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243548378&sr=1-1">SWISH: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Happened Instead</a>, represents some of the best memoir writing of the last decade. Who can say? Memory is a funny thing. Speaking of which, you might want to bookmark this post, campers: since I’m going to be wrapping up my theoretical discussion of standard format today, I’m going to list all of the rules we have discussed so far. That’s right: the whole shebang, listed in a single post. Can’t you feel the excitement in the air? Let’s get cracking. (1) All manuscripts should be printed or typed in black ink and double-spaced, with one-inch margins around all edges of the page, on 20-lb or better white paper. (2) All manuscripts should be printed on ONE side of the page and unbound in any way. (3) The text should be left-justified, NOT block-justified. By definition, manuscripts should NOT resemble published books in this respect. (4) The preferred typefaces are 12-point Times, Times New Roman, Courier, or Courier New — unless you’re writing screenplays, in which case you may only use Courier. For book manuscripts, pick one (and ONLY one) and use it consistently throughout your entire submission packet. (5) The ENTIRE manuscript should be in the same font and size — no switching typefaces for any reason. Industry standard is 12-point. (6) Do NOT use boldface anywhere in the manuscript BUT on the title page — and not even there, necessarily. (7) EVERY page in the manuscript should be numbered EXCEPT the title page. (8) Each page of the manuscript (other than the title page) should have a standard slug line in the header. The page number should appear in the slug line, not anywhere else on the page. (9) The first page of each chapter should begin a third of the way down the page, with the chapter title appearing on the FIRST line of the page, NOT on the line immediately above where the text begins. (10) Contact information for the author belongs on the title page, NOT on page 1. (11) Every submission should include a title page, even partial manuscripts. (12) The beginning of EVERY paragraph of text should be indented .5 inch. No exceptions, ever. (13) Don’t skip an extra line between paragraphs, except to indicate a section break. (14) NOTHING in a manuscript should be underlined. Titles of songs and publications, as well as words in foreign languages and those you wish to emphasize, should be italicized. All of those make sense, I hope, at least provisionally? Excellent. Moving on… (15) All numbers under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25. But numbers over 100 should be written as numbers: 1,243, not one thousand, two hundred and forty-three. Violations of this one routinely make people who read manuscripts for a living twitch uncontrollably. Yet an unfortunately high percentage of otherwise industry-savvy aspiring writers are apparently unaware of this particular rule — or apply it incorrectly. The instinct to correct it in a submission is universal in professional readers. From that impulse to rejection is often a fairly short journey, because once the notion gee, this writer hasn’t taken the time to learn the ropes has occurred to a professional reader, it’s hard to unthink. After that, anything from a major cliché to a minor typo would just seem like corroboration of this uncharitable — and in some cases unfair — conclusion. Translation: NOT presenting your numbers correctly will not help you win friends and influence people at agencies and publishing houses. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Like pointing out foreign-language words with special formatting, this formatting rule was originally for the benefit of the manual typesetters. When numbers are entered as numbers, a single slip of a finger can result in an error, whereas when numbers are written out, the error has to be in the inputer’s mind. There are only three exceptions to this rule: dates, currency, and, of course, page numbers. Thus, a properly-formatted manuscript dealing with events on November 11 would look like this on the page: <blockquote> Abbott/The Great Voyage/82 The sandwich cost $3.76. On November 11, 1492, fifty-three scholars divided into eighteen parties in preparation for sailing to Antarctica. It took 157 rowboats ten trips apiece to load all of their books, papers, and personal effects onboard. </blockquote> And not like this: <blockquote> Abbott/The Great Voyage/Eighty-two The sandwich cost three dollars and seventy-six cents, cash American. On November eleventh, fourteen hundred and ninety-two, fifty-three scholars divided into eighteen parties in preparation for sailing to Antarctica. It took a hundred and fifty-seven rowboats ten trips apiece to load all of their books, papers, and personal effects onboard. </blockquote> Do I see some hands waving in the air? “But Anne,” inveterate readers of newspapers protest, “I’m accustomed to seeing numbers like 11, 53, 18, and 10 written as numerals in print. Does that mean that when I read, say, a magazine article with numbers under 100 depicted this way, that some industrious editor manually changed all of those numbers after the manuscript was submitted?” No, it doesn’t — although I must say, the mental picture of that poor, unfortunate soul assigned to spot and make such a nit-picky change is an intriguing one. What you have here is yet another difference between book manuscript format and, well, every other kind of formatting out there: in journalism, they write out only numbers under 10. Unfortunately, many a writing teacher out there believes that the over-10 rule should be applied to all forms of writing, anywhere, anytime. Yes, this is true for newspaper articles, where space is at a premium, but in a book manuscript, it is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Did I mention it was wrong? And that my aged eyes have actually seen contest entries knocked out of finalist consideration over this particular issue? More than once? And within the last year? AP style differs from standard format in several important respects, not the least being that in standard format (as in other formal presentations in the English language), the first letter of the first word after a colon should not be capitalized, since technically, it’s not the beginning of a new sentence. I don’t know who introduced the convention of post-colon capitalization, but believe me, I’m not the only one who read the submissions of aspiring book writers for a living that’s mentally consigned that language subversive to a pit of hell that would make even Dante avert his eyes in horror. That’s the way we nit-pickers roll. We like our formatting and grammatical boundaries firm. Heck, amongst professional readers, my feelings on the subject are downright non-confrontational. I’ve been in more than one contest judging conference where tables were actually banged and modern societies deplored. Trust me, you don’t want your entry to be the one that engenders this reaction. So let’s all chant it together, shall we? The formatting and grammatical choices you see in newspapers will not necessarily work in manuscripts or literary contest entries. Everyone clear on that? Good, because — are you sitting down, lovers of newspapers? — embracing journalistic conventions like the post-colon capital and writing out only numbers under ten will just look like mistakes to Millicent and her ilk on the submission page. And no, there is no court of appeal for such decisions; proper format, like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder. So if you were planning to cry out, “But that’s the way USA TODAY does it!” save your breath. Unfortunately, although my aforementioned heart aches for those of you who intended to protest, “But how on earth is an aspiring writer to know that the standards are different?” this is a cry that is going to fall on deaf ears as well. Which annoys me, frankly. The sad fact is, submitters rejected for purely technical reasons are almost never aware of it. With few exceptions, the rejecters will not even take the time to scrawl, “Take a formatting class!” or “Next time, spell-check!” on the returned manuscript. If a writer is truly talented, they figure, she’ll mend her ways and try again. And that, in case any of you lovely people had been wondering, is why I revisit the topic of standard format so darned often. How can the talented mend their ways if they don’t know how — or even if — their ways are broken? (16) Dashes should be doubled — rather than using an emdash — with a space at either end. Hyphens are single and are not given extra spaces at either end, as in self-congratulatory. Yes, yes, I know: you’ve probably heard that this rule is obsolete, too, gone the way of underlining. The usual argument for its demise: books no longer preserve these spaces, for reasons of printing economy, so many writing teachers tell their students just to go ahead and eliminate them. An AP-trained teacher will tell you to use the longer emdash, as will the Chicago Manual of Style. In this, however, they are wrong, at least as far as manuscripts are concerned. (You’re starting to get used to that, right?) Standard format is invariable upon this point: a doubled dash with a space on either end is correct; anything else is not. And yes, it is indeed a common enough pet peeve that the pros will complain to one another about how often submitters get it wrong. They also bemoan how often they see manuscripts where this rule is applied inconsistently: two-thirds of the dashes doubled, perhaps, sometimes with a space at either end and sometimes not, with the odd emdash and single dash dotting the text as well. It may seem like a minor, easily-fixable phenomenon from the writer’s side of the submission envelope, but believe me, inconsistency drives people trained to spot minor errors nuts. Your word-processing program probably changes a double dash to an emdash automatically, but CHANGE IT BACK. If only as a time-saver: any agent would make you do this before agreeing to submit your manuscript to an editor, so you might as well get into this salutary habit as soon as possible. (17) Adhere to the standard rules of punctuation and grammar, not what it being done on the moment in newspapers, magazines, books, or on the Internet — including the rule calling for TWO spaces after every period and colon. In other words, do as Strunk & White say, not what others do. Assume that Millicent graduated with honors from the best undergraduate English department in the country (or at least the fifteenth-best), taught by the grumpiest, meanest, least tolerant stickler for grammar that ever snarled at a student unfortunate enough to have made a typo, and you’ll be fine. Or, if that mental image isn’t frightening enough, try envisioning the many, many professional writers who delighted in leaping upon the slightest hint of grammatical impropriety even in spoken English throughout my formative years. I know that works for me. The primary deviation I’ve been seeing in recent years is leaving only one space, rather than the standard two, after a period. The rationale runs thus: printed books usually do this now, to save paper; the fewer the spaces on a page, the more words can be crammed onto it. Since we’ve all seen it done in recently-released books, some argue — and vehemently — it would be ludicrous to format a manuscript any other way. Indeed, you may have seen that one touted as the proper way to format a manuscript. A number of writing-advice websites, I notice, and even some writing teachers have been telling people that this is the wave of the future — and that adhering to the two-space norm makes a manuscript look obsolete. Some even tout this as a universal instant-rejection offense. At the risk of sounding like the harsh grammar-mongers of my youth, poppycock. Agents, very good ones, routinely submit manuscripts with doubled spaces to editors, also very good ones, all the time. Successfully. But truth compels me to point out that there are also many agents, also good ones, who have embraced the single-space convention, and quite adamantly. Although some agents and editors do now request eliminating the second space at the submission stage, the doubled space is still the norm — except amongst the minority who feel very strongly that it is not. Clear as pea soup, right? So which convention should you embrace? The answer, as it so often is, involves doing your homework about the specific agent or publisher you are planning to approach. As always, it’s ultimately up to you; it’s really a question of choosing whom to please — or producing two different manuscripts for submission. Once you get in the habit of doing that research, I suspect those of you who have heard horror stories about how everybody now positively hates the second space convention will be astonished to see how few agencies even mention it in their submission guidelines. If they don’t, it’s usually safe to assume that they adhere to the older convention — or at the very least, don’t care. If, however, you happen to be submitting to one of those people who specifically asks for single spaces, in which case, you’d be silly not to bow to their expressed preferences. (Sensing a pattern here?) Fortunately, for aspiring writers everywhere, those agents who do harbor a strong preference for the single space tend not to keep mum about it. If they actually do tell their Millicents to regard a second space as a sign of creeping obsolescence, chances are very, very good that they’ll mention that fact on their websites. Again, double-check before you submit. If the agent of your dreams has not specified, double-space. Why should that be the default option, since proponents of eliminating the second space tend to be so very vocal? Those who cling to the older tradition tend to be, if anything, a shade more vehement. Why, you ask? Editing experience, usually. Preserving that extra space after each sentence in a manuscript makes for greater ease of reading, and thus editing. As anyone who has ever edited a long piece of writing can tell you, the white space on the page is where the comments — grammatical changes, pointing out flow problems, asking, “Does the brother really need to die here?” — go. Less white space, less room to comment. It honestly is that simple. Oh, and it drives the grammar-hounds nuts to hear that time-honored standards are being jettisoned in the name of progress. “What sane human being,” they ask through gritted teeth, “seriously believes that replacing tonight with tonite, or all right with alright constitutes progress? Dropping the necessary letters and spaces doesn’t even save significant page space!” Those are some pretty vitriol-stained lines in the sand, aren’t they? Let’s just say that until everyone in the industry makes the transition editing in soft copy — which is, as I have pointed out many times in this forum, both harder and less efficient than scanning a printed page — the two-space rule is highly unlikely to change universally. Just ask a new agent immediately after the first time he’s submitted to an old-school senior editor: if he lets his clients deviate from the norms, he’s likely to be lectured for fifteen minutes on the great beauty of the English language and the imperative to protect its graceful strictures from the invading Goths, Visigoths, and journalists. I sense that some of you are starting to wring your hands and rend your garments in frustration. “I just can’t win here! Most want it one way, a few another. I’m so confused about what’s required that I keep switching back and forth between two spaces and one while I’m typing.” I hate to be the one to break it to you, but inconsistent formatting is likely to annoy both sides of the aisle. Whichever choice you embrace, be consistent about it throughout your manuscript; don’t kid yourself that an experienced professional reader isn’t going to notice if you sometimes use one format, sometimes the other. He will. So will a veteran contest judge. Pick a convention and stick with it. But don’t fret over it too much. This honestly isn’t as burning a debate amongst agents and editors as many aspiring writers seem to think. But as always: check before you submit. If the agent’s website, contest listing, and/or Twitter page doesn’t mention individual preferences, assume s/he’s going to be submitting to old-school editors and retain the second space. And be open to the possibility — brace yourselves; you’re not going to like this — that you may need to submit your manuscript formatted one way for a single agent on your list, and another for the other nineteen. Hey, I warned you that you weren’t going to like it. (18) Turn off the widow/orphan control; it gives pages an uneven number of lines. The widow/orphan control, for those of you new to the term. is the setting on a word processing program that controls how many lines appear on any given page. The default setting prevents the first line of a new paragraph from being left alone on a page if the rest of the paragraph is on the next (a line so left behind is called an orphan) or the last line of a paragraph begun on a previous page from appearing at the top of the next page all by itself (and that’s called a widow). Thus, if the widow/orphan control is left on, lines will be stolen from one page and added to the ones before and after. Result: some of your pages will have more lines of text on them than others. Why might that be problematic? Well, unless your pages are standardized, you can’t justify estimating your word count (at # of pages x 250 in Times New Roman). Since word counts for book-length projects are expected to be estimated (you’ll need to use the actual count for short stories or articles), and actual count can be as much as 20% higher than estimated, it’s certainly in the best interest of anyone who tends to run a little long to estimate. And even if your manuscript isn’t over 400 pages (100,000 words, estimated), the usual dividing line for Millicent to cry, “Oh, too bad; it’s too long for a first novel in this book category. Next!” she’s going to dislike seeing an extra inch of white space on the bottom of some of your pages. Not necessarily enough to shout, “Next!” anyway, but do you really want something that superficial to be your submission’s last straw? Here’s how to turn it off in Word: under the FORMAT menu, select PARAGRAPH…, then LINE AND PAGE BREAKS. Un-check the Widow/Orphan control box, and you’re home free! There you have it: the rules. Practice them until they are imbedded into your very bones, my friends: literally every page of text you submit to an agent, editor, or literary contest for the rest of your professional life (yes, including the synopsis) should be in standard format. Confused? Now would be a delightful time to ask some questions. Tomorrow, it’s on to concrete examples. Keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-2998" class="post-2998 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-e-mailed-submissions category-epigraphs category-formatpalooza category-formatting-manuscripts category-how-can-i-choose-between-competing-advice category-how-to-format-a-book-manuscript-just-the-facts category-industry-etiquette category-must-reads category-page-numbering category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-realistic-expectations-for-writers category-requested-material-wrangling category-slug-line category-standard-format-basics category-the-manuscript-formatting-rules category-the-rules-of-book-formatting category-title-pages category-what-an-agent-will-expect-your-manuscript-to-look-like category-why-are-there-so-many-different-sets-of-writing-rules-online"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/12/05/formatpalooza-part-ii-not-all-truths-are-self-evident-8/industry-etiquette/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2010-12-05T00:00:00+00:00">December 5, 2010</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/12/05/formatpalooza-part-ii-not-all-truths-are-self-evident-8/industry-etiquette/#respond">No Comments on Formatpalooza, part II: not all truths are self-evident</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/12/05/formatpalooza-part-ii-not-all-truths-are-self-evident-8/industry-etiquette/" rel="bookmark">Formatpalooza, part II: not all truths are self-evident</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/gumballs-1024x768.jpg" alt="gumballs" title="gumballs" width="512" height="384" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-13642"/> Hard to believe anyone would actually need to be told that those are gumballs, isn’t it? They are the epitome of the breed: large, spherical, colorful, and — dare I say it? — potentially jawbreaking. Yet clearly, at some point in the probably not-too-distant past, some passing myopic soul must have asked the proprietor, “So are those gumballs?” I suspect that s/he just got tired of answering the same question 4200 times per week. Those of us who work with manuscripts for a living can sympathize. Just to breathe the word editor (or my preferred title, book doctor) anywhere near the pronoun I and the verb am is to invite an avalanche of questions about manuscripts: how to get them published, how to get them under the eyes of an agent, how to keep them from getting rejected, and, surprisingly often, what they should look like. Frankly, there seems to be a lot of confusion out there on that last subject — and that puzzles the pros, because standard format for manuscripts actually hasn’t changed all that much over the last 50 years. Oh, underlining is out and italics are in to designate words in foreign languages (currently, one should never underline anything in a book manuscript; I’ll be getting to that), and how one does indentation has altered a bit with the adoption of Microsoft Word as the industry standard for electronic submission (Word measures its tabs in fractions of an inch, not character spaces), but overall, the professionally-formatted manuscripts of today quite closely resemble the professionally-formatted manuscripts of, say, 1958. That’s not to say, of course — or is it really that self-evident? — that all writing should be, or ever was, formatted in this manner. Short story format is different from standard format for books and book proposals, and has been for quite some time. So are essay format, academic format, journalistic format, and even how a published book will look on a page. Which is, I suspect, the source of most of the confusion amongst aspiring writers of books. A tremendous amount of the formatting advice out there doesn’t seem to make the distinction between submitting writing to an agent or editor at a publishing house and submitting it to a magazine that prints short stories — or, indeed, presenting it in any context. That small omission leads many, many aspiring writers down the proverbial primrose path, because the fact is, the rules are different for different types of writing. Do all of those eyebrows currently slapping into hairlines mean that this comes as a surprise to some of you? Were you under the impression that all writing should be formatted identically for submission anywhere, anytime? If so, you are most emphatically not alone, especially since the rise of Google. Now, it’s far from uncommon for aspiring writers to plug manuscript page, submission format, or some similarly descriptive term into a search engine and come up with 25,000 pages, 65% of which will claim (or at least imply by omission) that they are stating the presentation rules for all professional writing. Except they’re not. How do I know? Because it’s empirically impossible. “But Anne,” some of you ask, cradling your sore brows, “why should that be the case? There are plenty of authors who write both short stories and novels, or essays and nonfiction books. Wouldn’t it just make sense that everybody would use the same format for writing?” That would make sense, if (a) the overall system had been set up by writers, not publishers, (b) there had ever been an overall system governing all kinds of writing, and/or (c) the various species of writing were not published by completely distinct sets of people, each of whom have established norms for their own particular branches. Obviously — or is it so obvious? — the people outside an industry do not have the right to set submission standards for the people within it. Or, to put it another way: just as all writing is not identical, neither is all publishing. That very notion is making some of you squirm, isn’t it? I’m not entirely surprised: every time I have broached the subject formally, those who have heard rumors elsewhere that something has changed leap upon my well-intentioned little gazelles of advice with the ferocity of hungry lions, demanding that I either recant my not at all heretical beliefs or, as I mentioned last time, to compel literally every other writing advice-giver in North America to agree to abide by precisely the same rules. To dispel any illusions up front: neither of those things is going to happen during Formatpalooza. In my professional experience, the formatting I’m discussing here is indeed important, and not just in theory. I have sold books adhering to these rules; my editing clients have sold books using them; agents, editors, and contest judges regularly complain about writers who don’t adhere to them — or even know such rules exist. So I feel entirely comfortable in saying early and often that manuscripts presented in standard format look professional to people who handle manuscripts for a living. Does that mean every professional reader, everywhere, every time, will want to see your work formatted this way? No, of course not: as I also say early and often, should you happen to be submitting to an agent, editor, or contest that specifically asks you to do something other than I advise here, obviously, you should give him, her, or it what he or his stated guidelines request. That’s just common sense, right? Not to mention basic courtesy. Yet judging by the plethora of questions I’m constantly getting on the subject, it’s not self-evident. To make this last point pellucidly clear for those of you who have not been hanging around Author! Author! throughout our long autumn of ‘Paloozas: I would actively encourage you not only to check the standard agency guides for expressions of alternate preferences, but also to run an Internet search on any individual agent to whom you were planning to submit, to double-check that s/he hasn’t stated in some public forum that, for instance, s/he prefers only a single space after a period or a colon or can’t stand the sight of Times New Roman instead of Courier. Admittedly, it requires a bit more effort on the submitter’s part, but hey, it’s worth it. Why? Chant it with me now, ‘Palooza devotees: if an agent or editor has been kind enough to take the time to tell aspiring writers precisely what s/he wants to see, be it in a query letter, storyline, or manuscript submission, a savvy writer should pay attention. Again, that’s just being both smart and polite, isn’t it? If an agency has been considerate enough of its future clients to post submission guidelines, it’s only courteous to acknowledge their efforts. I spot some timid hands raised out there. “But Anne,” point out some confused by conflicting advice — and who could blame them, given the multiplicity of it? “I’ve been doing my homework, and the overwhelming majority of the guide listings and agency websites I’ve found don’t talk about manuscript format at all. Does that mean that these fine folks just don’t care about how I present my writing?” The short answer is no. The long answer is that standard format is just that: standard. So much so that to many folks who read and sell manuscripts for a living, it’s patently self-evident that they expect to see submissions in standard format. So here is the mid-length answer: in the absence of specific alternate directions, the best course is always to adhere to the rules of standard format. That’s why I revisit this topic regularly. To repeat the disclaimer I’ve run every single time I’ve run a series on formatting: these are the rules that I use myself, the ones that my lengthy experience tells me work. There are, however, other rules out there, presented by some very credible sources. If you find other guidelines that make sense to you, use them with my good wishes. Seriously: as far as I’m concerned, what you do with your manuscript up to you. I’m only trying to be helpful here. Personally, I would strenuously advise against implementing any piece of formatting advice that deviates from the strictures of standard format unless you are positive that the specific agent or contest to whom you are planning to submit it wants to see your work that way — all too often, individual agents’ preferences fly around the rumor mill billed as the new universal expectation — but hey, I’m a realist: I’m aware that many, if not most, aspiring writers find it magnificently annoying to learn that they might have to produce more than one version of their manuscripts to submit to agents (or, even more common, writing contests) with different guidelines. They want to format their work once and be done with it, and who can blame them? While I’m strenuously advising things, I would also urge you never to implement a rule you do not understand. That’s why I provide such extensive explanations for each of my suggested guidelines — so my readers may consider the various recommendations out there and form their own opinions. You’re smart people; I know you’re up to the challenge. I’m also confident that my readers are savvy enough to understand that paying attention to how a manuscript looks does not imply that how it is written doesn’t make a difference. Of course, writing talent, style, and originality count. Yet in order to notice any of those, a reader has to approach the page with a willingness to be wowed. That willingness can wilt rapidly in the face of incorrect formatting — which isn’t, in response to what half of you just thought, necessarily the result of mere market-mindedness on the part of the reader. After you’ve read a few thousand manuscripts, deviations from standard format leap out at you. As will spelling and grammatical errors, phrase repetition, clichés, telling rather than showing, and all of the writing problems we’ve all heard so much. They’re distractions from your good writing. My goal here is to help you minimize the distractions that would catch Millicent the agency screener’s eye first. I hear those of you who have spent years slaving over your craft groaning out — believe me, I sympathize. For those of you who have not already started composing your first drafts in standard format (which will save you a lot of time in the long run, incidentally), many of the tiny-but-pervasive changes I am about to suggest that you make to your manuscript are going to be irksome to implement. Reformatting a manuscript is time-consuming and tedious, and I would be the first to admit that at first, some of these rules can seem arbitrary. At least on their faces. Quite a few of these restrictions remain beloved even in the age of electronic submissions because they render a manuscript a heck of a lot easier to edit — and to read, in either hard or soft copy. As I will demonstrate with abundant examples later in this series, a lot of these rules exist for completely practical purposes — designed, for instance, to maximize white space in which the editor may scrawl trenchant comments like, “Wait, wasn’t the protagonist’s brother named James in the last chapter? Why is he Aloysius here?” Perhaps this is self-evident from what I have already said, but here’s one last, quick caveat before I launch back into the list: the standard format restrictions I’m listing here are not intended to be applied to short stories, poetry, journalistic articles, academic articles, or indeed any other form of writing. The guidelines in this series are for BOOK manuscripts and proposals, and thus should not be applied to other kinds of writing. Similarly, the standards applicable to magazine articles, short stories, dissertations, etc. should not be applied to book proposals or manuscripts. For the guidelines for these, you may — and should — seek elsewhere. (See my earlier rejection of universality.) Everyone clear on that and ready to dive back into the matter at hand? Excellent; help yourself to a gumball. Let’s recap the rules we covered last time: (1) All manuscripts should be printed or typed in black ink and double-spaced, with one-inch margins around all edges of the page, on 20-lb or better white paper. (2) All manuscripts should be printed on ONE side of the page and unbound in any way. (3) The text should be left-justified, NOT block-justified. By definition, manuscripts should NOT resemble published books in this respect. (4) The preferred typefaces are 12-point Times, Times New Roman, Courier, or Courier New — unless you’re writing screenplays, in which case you may only use Courier. For book manuscripts, pick one (and ONLY one) and use it consistently throughout your entire submission packet. Is everyone happy with those? PLEASE pipe up with questions, if not. In the meantime, let’s move on. (5) The ENTIRE manuscript should be in the same font and size. Industry standard is 12-point. No exceptions, please. No matter how cool your desired typeface looks, or how great the title page looks with 14-point type. Yes, even on the title page, where almost everyone gets a little wacky the first time out. No pictures or symbols here, either, please. Just the facts. (If you don’t know how to format a title page professionally — and yes, Virginia, there is a professional format for it — please see the TITLE PAGE category on the list at right.) I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there’s a term for title pages with 24-point fonts, fancy typefaces, and illustrations. It’s high school book report. Need I say more? (6) Do not use boldface anywhere in the manuscript BUT on the title page — and not even there, it’s not mandatory. This seems like an odd one, right? Actually, the no-bolding rule is a throwback to the old typewriter days, where only very fancy machines indeed could darken selected type. So historically, using bold in-text is considered a bit tacky for the same reason that wearing white shoes before Memorial Day is in certain circles: it’s a subtle display of wealth. You didn’t think all of those white shoes the Victorians wore cleaned themselves, did you? Shiny white shoes equaled scads of busily-polishing servants. You may place your title in boldface on the title page, if you like, but that’s it. Nothing else in the manuscript should be bolded. (Unless it’s a section heading in a nonfiction proposal or manuscript — but don’t worry about that for now; I’ll be showing you how to format both a book proposal and a section break later on in this series, I promise.) (7) Every page in the manuscript should be numbered — except the title page. I’m quite serious about this: even if you take no other advice from Formatpalooza, please remember to number your pages. This may seem like a little thing, but you’d be surprised how often violating this rule results in instantaneous rejection. Few non-felonious offenses irk the professional manuscript reader (including yours truly, if I’m honest about it) more than an unnumbered submission or contest entry. It ranks right up there on their rudeness scale with assault, arson, and beginning a query letter with, Dear Agent. Why? Gravity, my friends, gravity. What goes up tends to come down — and if the object in question happens to be an unbound stack of paper… Did that seem like an abstract metaphor? Not at all. Picture, if you will, two manuscript-bearing interns walking toward each other in an agency hallway. Between them, a banana peel. What is going to happen when the first slips, and the second tumbles on top of him, screaming? You may giggle, but anyone who has ever worked with submissions has first-hand experience of this (okay, perhaps not the part about the banana peel, as well as what comes next: after the blizzard of flying papers dies down, and the two combatants rehash that old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial’s dialogue (“You got romance novel in my literary fiction!” “You got literary fiction in my romance novel!”), what needs to happen? Yup. Some luckless soul has to put all of those pages back in the proper order. Put yourself in Millicent’s moccasins for a moment: just how much more irksome is that task going to be if the pages are not numbered? Number your pages. Trust me, it is far, far, FAR easier for Millicent to toss the entire thing into the reject pile than to spend the hours required to guess which bite-sized piece of storyline belongs before which in an unnumbered manuscript. FYI, the first page of the text proper is page 1 of the text, not the title page, and should be numbered as such. If your opus has an introduction or preface, the first page of that is page 1, not the first page of chapter 1. Why, you ask? Long-time readers, pull out your hymnals and sing along: BECAUSE A MANUSCRIPT SHOULD NOT LOOK IDENTICAL TO A PUBLISHED BOOK. The title page is not the only one commonly mislabeled as page one, by the way: epigraphs — those quotations from other authors’ books so dear to the hearts of writers everywhere — should not appear on their own page in a manuscript, as they sometimes do in published books. If you feel you must include one (considering that 99.9999% of the time, Millicent will just skip over it), include it between the chapter title and text on page 1. If that last paragraph left your head in a whirl, don’t worry — I’ll show you how to format epigraphs properly later in this series. (Yes, including some discussion of that cryptic comment about Millicent. All in the fullness of time, my friends.) (8) Each page of the manuscript (other than the title page) should have a standard slug line in the header. The page number should appear in the slug line, not anywhere else on the page. Including the slug line means that every page of the manuscript has the author’s name on it — a great idea, should you, say, want an agent or editor to be able to contact you after s/he’s fallen in love with it. The slug line should appear in the upper left-hand margin (although no one will sue you if you put it in the upper right-hand margin, left is the time-honored location) of every page of the text except the title page (which should have nothing in the header or footer at all). A trifle confused by all that terminology? I’m not entirely surprised. Most writing handbooks and courses tend to be a trifle vague about this particular requirement, so allow me to define the relevant terms: a well-constructed slug line includes the author’s last name, book title, and page number, to deal with that intern-collision problem I mentioned earlier. (The slug line allows the aforementioned luckless individual to tell the romance novel from the literary fiction.) And the header, for those of you who have not yet surrendered to Microsoft Word’s lexicon, is the 1-inch margin at the top of each page. Traditionally, the slug line appears all in capital letters, but it’s not strictly necessary; if the agent of your dreams has a preference on the matter, trust me, you’ll be the first to hear about it after she signs you. Personally, I find the all-caps format visually distracting, so the third page of my memoir has a slug line that looks like this: <blockquote> Mini/A Family Darkly/3 </blockquote> Since the only place a page number should appear on a page of text is in the slug line, if you are in the habit of placing numbers wacky places like the middle of the footer, do be aware that it does not look strictly professional to, well, professionals. Double-check that your word processing program is not automatically adding extraneous page markers. Do not, I beg of you, yield like so many aspiring writers to the insidious temptation add little stylistic bells and whistles to the slug line, to tart it up. Page numbers should not have dashes on either side of them, be in italics or bold, or be preceded by the word page. If that admonition strikes you as a disappointing barrier to your self-expression, remember, professional readers do not regard formatting choices as conveyers of personal style. The point here is not to make your slug line stand out for its innovative style, but your writing. In order for that to be possible, your manuscript’s pages to look exactly like every other professional writer’s. And yes, Virginia, I am going to keep making that point over and over until you are murmuring it in your sleep. Why do you ask? If you have a subtitle, don’t include it in the slug line — and if you have a very long title, feel free to abbreviate, to keep the slug line from running all the way across the top of the page. The goal here is to identify the manuscript at a glance, not to reproduce the entire book jacket. Why not? Well, technically, a slug line should be 30 spaces or less, but there’s no need to stress about that in the computer age. (A slug, you see, is the old-fashioned printer’s term for a pre-set chunk of, you guessed it, 30 spaces of type. Aren’t you glad you asked?) Keep it brief. For instance. my agent is currently circulating a novel of mine entitled THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB — 26 characters, counting spaces. Since my last name is quite short, I could get away with putting it all in the slug line, to look like this: <blockquote> Mini/The Buddha in the Hot Tub/1 </blockquote> If, however, my last name were something more complicated, such as Montenegro-Copperfield — 22 characters all by itself, including dash — I might well feel compelled to abbreviate. Just for the sake of variety, let’s see it in all caps: <blockquote> MONTENEGRO-COPPERFIELD/BUDDHA/1 </blockquote> Incidentally, should anyone out there come up with a bright idea for a category heading on the archive list for this issue other than SLUG LINE — a category that already exists, but is unlikely to be found by anyone not already familiar with the term — I’d be delighted to hear suggestions. I’ve called it a slug line ever since I first clapped eyes on a professional manuscript (an event that took place so long ago my response to the sight was not, “What’s that at the top of the page, Daddy?” but “Goo!”), so I’m probably not going to be coming up with a good alternative anytime soon. Thanks. (9) The first page of each chapter should begin a third of the way down the page, with the chapter title appearing on the first line of the page, not on the line immediately above where the text begins. That’s fourteen single-spaced lines, incidentally. Don’t panic if you’re having trouble visualizing this — I’ll be giving concrete examples of what the first page of a chapter should look like later in this series. The chapter title (or merely “Chapter One”) may appear on the first line of the first page — not on the last line before the text, as so many writers mistakenly do. The chapter title or number should be centered, and it should neither be in boldface nor underlined. Why shouldn’t the title appear immediately above the text, as one so often sees — and, frankly, as some other writing sites advise? Because that’s where the title of a short story lives, not a book’s. Self-evident now that you’ve heard it, isn’t it? Because confusing the two formats is so common, very frequently, agents, editors and contest judges are presented with improperly-formatted first pages that include the title of the book, by Author’s Name, and/or the writer’s contact information in the space above the text. This is classic rookie mistake. To professional eyes, a manuscript that includes any of this information on the first page of the manuscript (other than in the slug line, of course) seems like it just ended up in the wrong office. Clearly, the writer wanted not the agency to which she sent it, but the magazine down the street. So where does all of that necessary contact information go, you ask? Read on. (10) Contact information for the author belongs on the title page, not on page 1. This is one of the most obvious visual differences between a short story submission (say, to a literary journal) and a novel submission. To submit a manuscript — or contest entry, for that matter — with this information on page 1 is roughly the equivalent of taking a great big red marker and scrawling, “I don’t know much about the business of publishing,” across it. Just don’t do it. “But wait,” I hear some of you out there murmuring, “I need a title page? Since when?” Funny you should mention that, because… (11) Every submission for a book-length work should include a title page, even partial manuscripts. This one seems to come as a surprise to a lot of aspiring writers. You should always include a title page with ANY submission of ANY length, including contest entries and the chapters you send after the agent has fallen in love with your first 50 pages. Why, you ask? Because it is genuinely unheard-of for a professional manuscript not to have a title page: literally every manuscript that any agent in North America sends to any editor in hard copy will include one, for the exceedingly simple reason that it’s the page that includes the agent’s contact information. Yet, astonishingly, a good 95% of writers submitting to agencies seem to be unaware that including it is industry standard. To them, the cover letter, address on the SASE, or the e-mail to which the requested materials were attached are identification enough. But in practice, it’s actually none of those things will necessarily still be attached to your pages at the point when the agent of your dreams says, “By jingo, I’ve read enough. This is a writer I must sign, and pronto!” Oh, you think that the SASE won’t go flying when those interns collide in the hallway? Or that e-mails never get deleted accidentally? On the bright side, the widespread ignorance that a title page is expected means that if you are industry-savvy enough to include a professionally-formatted title page with your work, your submission automatically looks like a top percentile ranker to professional eyes from the moment it’s pulled out of the envelope. It’s never too early to make a good first impression, right? If you do not know how to format a proper title page — and yes, Virginia, there is a special format for it, too — please see the TITLE PAGE category at right. Or wait a few days until I cover it later in this series. Again, it’s entirely up to you. No pressure here. Have a gumball while you wait. Before anyone who currently has a submission languishing at an agency begins to panic: you’re almost certainly not going to get rejected solely for forgetting to include a title page. Omitting a title page is too common a gaffe to be an automatic deal-breaker for most Millicents. Ditto with improperly-formatted ones. And yes, one does occasionally run into an agent at a conference or one blogging online who says she doesn’t care one way or the other about whether a submission has a title page resting on top at all. Bully for them for being so open-minded, but as I point out roughly 127,348 times per year in this forum, how can you be sure that the person deciding whether to pass your submission upstairs or reject it isn’t a stickler for professionalism? I sense some shoulders sagging at the very notion of all the work it’s going to be to alter your pages before you send them out. Please believe me when I tell you that, as tedious as it is to change these things in your manuscript now, by the time you’re on your third or fourth book, it will be second nature to you. Why, I’ll bet that the next time you sit down to begin a new writing project, you will automatically format it correctly. Think of all of the time that will save you down the line. Hey, in this business, you learn to take joy in the small victories. More guidelines follow in the next couple of posts — yes, those of you whose hearts just sank audibly, standard format does indeed have that many rules — and then we shall move on swiftly to concrete examples of what all of this formatting looks like in practice. Why go over this in such detail? Because, again, I’m not asking you to embrace these guidelines just because I say so. You should never do that, no matter how credible the source urging you to implement a rule that is new to you. I want you to have enough information on the subject to be able to understand why following them might be a good idea. I’m funny that way. Keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-3142" class="post-3142 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-after-you-land-a-publisher category-book-publishing-basics category-changing-nature-of-publishing category-dealing-with-rejection category-figuring-out-which-agents-to-query category-finding-agents-to-query category-generating-a-querying-list category-how-the-publishing-industry-works-and-doesnt category-how-to-find-agents-to-query category-industry-terminology category-lets-talk-about-this category-querying-fatigue category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-realistic-expectations-for-writers category-submission-fatigue"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/12/02/how-to-find-agents-to-query-palooza-part-xii-pushing-boldly-forwardand-lets-talk-about-this-7/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2010-12-02T00:00:00+00:00">December 2, 2010</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/12/02/how-to-find-agents-to-query-palooza-part-xii-pushing-boldly-forwardand-lets-talk-about-this-7/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/#respond">No Comments on How to find agents to query-palooza, part XII: pushing boldly forward…and let’s talk about this</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/12/02/how-to-find-agents-to-query-palooza-part-xii-pushing-boldly-forwardand-lets-talk-about-this-7/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark">How to find agents to query-palooza, part XII: pushing boldly forward…and let’s talk about this</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/buster_keaton_train.jpg" alt="buster_keaton_train" title="buster_keaton_train" width="500" height="383" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-8550"/> Before I wrap up this series on how to figure out which agents do and do not belong on your querying list, I have two quick questions to ask of you, campers: what clever means do you use to find agents who represent books like yours — and what’s the one thing you most wish someone had told you just before you sent out your first query? If that second one sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve asked it of members of the Author! Author! community before — and received <a href="/index_p_655.html">some very enlightening answers</a>. I’m a big fan of mutual aid: let’s allow our individual experiences to help one another. So please be generous with your reminiscences, folks. The Comments function below is hungry for ‘em. Why end this series with questions, you ask? Because, really, the publishing world is changing so fast that rather than providing prescriptions for agent-finding, I feel as though I’ve been mostly writing about preliminary questions aspiring writers can ask themselves in order to prepare to examine an agent’s listing in one of the standard guides, page on an agent search site, conference brochure blurb, and/or agency’s website. Why is know thyself (and thy book) an absolutely indispensable prerequisite to generating a recherché querying list? Because — feel free to pull out your hymnals and sing along, campers — the surest path to rejection is to query agents who do not (or do not still) represent books in your chosen category. No matter how beautifully-written your manuscript or proposal is, or how exquisitely crafted your query letter may be, it is a waste of your valuable time to approach agents who do not have both a current interest in and a solid track record selling books like yours. Obviously — at least I hope it’s more obvious to you now than at the end of the summer — it’s going to be a whole lot easier to avoid wasting your time with non-starters if you know what it is you are trying to market: your book’s category, target audience, and why your book will appeal to those readers in a manner that no other book currently on the market will. Yes, yes, it’s sounds like a tall order, but I sincerely hope you find it empowering, rather than depressing. Of all the many, many things about the path from finished manuscript to publication that are completely outside a writer’s control, you have absolute authority over this one aspect: you, and only you, can decide whom to query and how. Besides, now you have the tools in your writer’s marketing kit to pull it off with aplomb. As may not have entirely escaped your notice in recent months, I’ve been devoting quite a lot of blog space to helping you do just that. In <a href="/index_p_11697.html">Querypalooza</a>, we spoke at length about how to customize a query letter for each individual agent on that carefully-selected list you are now contemplating; late in that series, and in the <a href="/index_p_12652.html">Synopsispalooza</a> and <a href="/index_p_13122.html">Authorbiopalooza</a> series that followed, we discussed query and submission packets and the things you might be asked to tuck inside them. So if you have made it all the way through this fall of ‘Paloozas, either reading them as I posted or in retrospect, please give yourself a big ol’ pat on the back. By committing to learning how querying and submission works, you can avoid the most common mistakes that lead to rejection — and approach the process of finding an agent for your work not as a massive, ugly mystery, but as a professional endeavor that’s going to take some time. You know how I’d like you to celebrate? Devote some time this weekend to researching a few new agents to query. Five is a nice number. (Ten is better, but I know how busy you are this time of year.) Did I hear a few exasperated gasps out there? “But Anne,” those of you who have been paying close attention point out, and not unreasonably, “wouldn’t now be a rather un-sensible time to be sending out a flotilla of queries? Doesn’t the publishing industry slow to a crawl between Thanksgiving and the end of the year — and then get overwhelmed with new queries just after New Year’s Day?? If I haven’t gotten a raft of queries out by now, shouldn’t I wait until after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day? (That’s the third week of January, for those of you reading outside the US, and are we not clever to be able to convey parentheses in speech?)” I have to admit, that’s quite the reasonable, well-argued objection. I’m not going to tell you it’s okay to put beefing up your query list on hold, mind you, but I give you full points for a good argument. Happy now? Even this late in the season, the autumn is an excellent time to be combing book reviews for agent leads, much better than the dead of winter. There are always a lot of great new books hitting the shelves in the fall, including most of the year’s crop of literary fiction and culture books. Traditionally, the fall is when publishers release books they expect to be in the running for big awards, although that calendar, like the century-old practice of releasing first novels in the spring, when they will not have to compete as directly with all of those established potential award-winners, has been becoming more flexible recently. But some parts of the calendar have not changed: you’re quite right that if you actually send out queries now, you’re likely not to hear back for a couple of months. Not just because of the many, many holiday functions between the beginning of Hanukah and New Year’s Eve, but due to the tens of thousands of aspiring authors who will suddenly decide at the end of December that their New Year’s resolution is going to be to query fifteen agents per month. They’d better get cracking on those query lists, hadn’t they? Actually, most of needn’t: since the average New Year’s resolution lasts less than three weeks, January is when all of those well-meaning resolvers’ missives hit agents’ desks — right after a long holiday break and in the middle of tax-preparation time for agencies. (Legally, agencies must provide clients with the previous year’s tax information on royalties by the end of January.) With the monumentally increased volume, agents and their assistants tend to get a mite testy around then. Since the vast majority of those rejected during that period will not query again until, oh, about twelve months later — if they try again at all — Millicent the agency screener’s life calms down considerably after the long Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend. And wouldn’t you rather have your query under her nose while her joie de vivre is on the upswing? The moral of the story: if you didn’t get your queries and submissions out before Thanksgiving, you’re better off sitting out the Christmas vacation and New Year’s rush. Wait until Millicent will be happier to see you headed her way. All that being said, even with predictably slower turn-around times over the next month and a half, making a big push to generate a really solid query list now — or update your old one, if you haven’t done so within the last six months –rather than after the New Year, will make it easier to keep up the momentum an aspiring writer needs to keep a query cycle going as long as necessary to land an agent. Stop groaning. If your manuscript deserves to get published — and I’m betting that it does — it deserves to make the rounds of the fifty or hundred agents that even the best books sometimes make these days. Yes, that’s a long haul, but nothing extends the querying process like running out of steam. Or not picking oneself up after a rejection, dusting off that query list, and moving on to the next name on it. Believe me, that’s a whole lot easier to do if you have a lengthy, well-researched, and up-to-date query list. It’s especially helpful if you are going to be trying to keep 5-10 queries out at any given time, beginning the end of January. Yes, I do mean sending that many out at once at once — hey, your time is too valuable to query them singly. The moment one rejection comes in, send out another query, so there are always a constant number in motion. Keep that momentum going. Why send out a new query on the same day as the last comes back? Because it’s the best way to fight off rejection-generated depression, that’s why: it’s something you can do in response to that soul-sapping form letter. Recognize that rejection by an agent, any agent, is only one person’s opinion (or, more commonly, one person’s screener’s opinion), and move on. At the risk of repeating myself: it can take a lot of asking before a writer hears yes, even a very good writer with a great book. Remember, you don’t want to sign with just any agent, any more than you would want to marry just anyone the law says you can. A relationship with an agent is, ideally, a very long-term commitment. You want to find the best one for you. Finding that special someone may well take some serious dating around. And that is not, contrary to popular opinion, necessarily any reflection at all upon your level of writing talent. Oh, you’ll want to write a good query letter, as well as avoiding the most common writing problems that lead submissions to be rejected. That, like other matters of format and craft, can be learned. Talent, however, can’t — but you can’t know for certain how talented you are until you get the technical matters right, so you can get a fair reading from the pros. But if you’ve been following the fall of ‘Paloozas, you already have the skills to write a professional-quality query letter, don’t you? At this point, you’re probably not going to hear back for a month or more, anyway. That’s plenty of time to work on polishing your manuscript. Oh, and to generate a truly top-notch query list, specialized for your particular book. Perhaps it’s not the best time to query, but you certainly can keep moving forward toward your goals in the interim. I feel in my bones that some of you out there are resisting my pep talk — I’ve been hearing it bouncing off your psyches like bullets off Superman’s chest. “But Anne,” those of you who are suffering from query fatigue wail, “I’m just so tired of querying. I hate being rejected, either via e-mail, that SASE I’m supposed to stuff in my mailed queries so I may pay the postage on my own rejection, or, most soul-sucking of all, by simply not hearing back at all on a query or submission. Can’t I just take a breather until, say, next March? Or June? Maybe by then, I will have gotten my second, third, or fifteenth wind.” I feel for your plight, fatigued ones, but in my experience, it requires considerably more energy for an aspiring writer to re-start a stalled querying push than to keep putting energy in it consistently over a long period. So ’m going to pull out all the stops, and end this series with one last blast of kryptonite-laden truth, to try to dissolve that most common of query-process stallers: the tendency to take the vagaries of this often attenuated process personally. It doesn’t make sense to do so, you know. And you should know, if you’ve been a regular part of our ongoing ‘Palooza party this autumn. I have been trying, in my own small way, to educate aspiring writers to the hard facts of the current literary market: it is, in fact, as difficult as it has ever been to land an agent and/or sign a publication contract. In my experience, understanding the basics of how the acceptance (and rejection) process works can save good writers time, chagrin, and wasteful expenses of despair. Falling prey to despair is a genuine danger here: we’ve all, I’m sure, been hearing gloom-and-doom predictions of the death of the printed word over the last few years. Oh, I certainly haven’t been exaggerating, say, how small, inadvertent mistakes can and do lead to instant rejection or the level of competition one must beat in order to sign with a good agency; by comparison with the conversation you’d be likely to hear behind the scenes at a top-flight writers’ conference, my rendition has been positively sunshiny. Of course, the printed word has been declared dead by naysayers with clockwork regularity since the mid-19th century. And, frankly, if the most recent batch of predictions had been correct, the last book in existence would have been bound a couple of years ago. Yet the sale of books seems to be marching on — weakened, perhaps, but still moving forward. Don’t believe me? Here’s a news item from 2007. Hachette moves to firm sale on backlist Hachette Livre UK is taking the radical step of moving its backlist publishing to a firm sale basis for environmental reasons. The UK’s largest publishing group, which includes Orion, Hodder, Headline, Octopus and Little, Brown, told staff and authors this morning…that it intends for all of its trade publishing to be put on a backlist firm sale footing by the end of 2008, following consultation with retailers. (For the rest of this article, follow <a href="http://www.thebookseller.com/news/48280-hachette-moves-to-firm-sale-on-backlist.html">this link</a>.) If this piece of news did not make you gasp spontaneously, I would guess that you are only dimly aware of just how many books are already pulped each year — that is, sent back to the publisher unsold for paper recycling — or how backlist sales typically work. Most bookstores buy new books from publishers on a provisional basis, with the understanding that they can send clean, unread copies back if they do not sell within a specified period of time. Often, the returns, especially paperbacks and trade paper, will be ground down into pulp to provide the raw material to print other books (thus the term pulping: they are reduced to paper pulp). From a marketing point of view, this arrangement makes quite a bit of sense: with certain rare exceptions (think Harry Potter), it’s pretty hard for a bookseller to know in advance how well a book will sell. Stocking extra copies encourages browsing, potentially good for brick-and-mortar bookstores, publisher, and reader alike. In recent years, however, books have been remaining on shelves for shorter stints than in the past. The length of time a bookseller will choose to keep a particular book on a shelf varies considerably by book and retailer; the same book may be allowed shelf space for a year at a small bookstore, yet last only a few weeks at a megastore like Barnes & Noble. Now that online and electronic book sales make up such a hefty proportion of the book market, fewer and fewer books are ever occupying retail shelves at all. That, too, encourages smaller print runs, in order to reduce the number of books ultimately pulped. This, in theory, is the primary benefit of print-on-demand (POD) publishing: only the actual number of books needed are produced, thus reducing pulping. It also, of course, reduces browsing. All of which means, in practice, that these days, a new book typically does not have very long to establish a track record as a seller before being subject to return. This, in turn, renders it more expensive for publishers to promote books, as the window of opportunity can be pretty small. See why publishers might be willing to pay a premium to have their books displayed face-up on tables for the first few weeks, rather than spine-out on a shelf? (Knowing that space is often rented can really change how one walks through a big chain bookstore, let me tell you.) Or why authors sometimes see fit to hire their own publicists for the first month after a book’s release? Backlist titles, by contrast, have been out for a while; they’re the releases from past seasons that the publisher elects to keep in print. Although they do not receive the press attention of new releases, backlist books have historically been the financial heart of most publishers’ business. This, too, has tended to work to all of our benefits. How often, for instance, have you discovered a genre author three books into a series? Or fell in love with a writer’s latest book and went back to read everything she ever published? (As I sincerely hope you do; after all, if we writers won’t purchase the more obscure works of living writers, who will?) If you’ve been able to find these books at your local bookstore or online, you’ve been buying backlist titles, gladdening publishers’ hearts and keeping the heartbeat of the industry alive. Because of readers like you, stocking backlist titles has been good bet for retailers: you might not move many copies of Clarissa in a given month, but when a reader wants it, it’s great if you have it to hand. But if a bookseller has to buy those backlist titles outright, with no opportunity to return them, it becomes substantially more expensive to keep, say, the complete opus of <a href="http://www.fallsapart.com/">Sherman Alexie</a> in stock in the years before he won the National Book Award. (His latest, an excellent and intriguing collection of shorts entitled <a href="http://www.grovepress.com/#page=isbn9780802144898%20">War Dances</a>, is now out in paperback, should your Secret Santa be casting about for gift ideas.) Let’s get back to that old news clipping about Hachette. Speaking as a hardcore reader of English prose, I was darned worried when I first read this: having heard on the literary grapevine that other UK publishers were considering implementing similar policies, I fretted myself sick about all of those British writers whose work might have gone out of print before those of us on this side of the pond have had a chance to hear how wonderful they are. Hasn’t happened yet, however. Why, I just sent away for some backlist volumes last week. Only now, I order directly online from a U.K. distributor. See? Change does not always equal demise. But, of course, the overall trend toward shorter shelf times is genuinely worrisome, especially if one ponders the financial prospects of authors already in print. Just as increasingly quick shelf turn-around for a current season’s books have rendered retailers less likely to take a chance on new authors (how much word-of-mouth can a small book garner in under a month, after all?), it’s probably safe to assume that a policy shift like this will make it harder for backlist authors to remain in print. “But Anne,” I hear some of you saying, “you’re always telling us that publishing trends change all the time — and that even if I get an agent tomorrow, it might be a couple of years before my book hits the shelves. Do I really need to worry about return policies now, while I’m plugging away at building my query list, as you have successfully guilted me into moving up on my to-do list?” Well, perhaps worry is too strong a word, but it is something to keep in mind when thinking about your writing career in the long term. Working authors often rely upon sales of their backlist works to pay the bills. If backlist sales decline — as they well might, if such a policy is embraced industry-wide — it may be significantly more difficult to make a consistent living as a writer of books in the years to come. In other words, this change may affect your ability to quit your day job after you’re published. Indeed, many of the quite solid debut novelists of the last few years have not — which, naturally, affects their ability to promote their current books (now largely the author’s responsibility, especially online) and write their next ones. In the short term, however, I think it’s always helpful for an aspiring writer to be aware that there is almost always more to an editor’s decision to acquire a book — and by extension, to an agent’s decision to offer it representation — than simply whether the writing is good. During periods when booksellers are taking fewer risks, publishers have historically relied more upon their tried-and-true authors than upon exciting new talent. Thus tightening the already tight market for what used to be called writers of promise, excellent authors who don’t catch on with the public until the fourth or fifth book. (Mssr. Alexie’s first book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, was originally published in 1993. Fortunately, it’s still available as a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lone-Ranger-Tonto-Fistfight-Heaven/dp/0060976241">backlist title</a>.) Do I think this change is cause for rending your garments and casting your hard-collected query lists into the nearest fire? No, certainly not. But I do think that aspiring writers who approach the querying and submission processes as though the book market has not become significantly tighter in recent years are more likely to give up when faced with rejection than those with a more up-to-date view of how the business works. Why are the former more likely to succumb to querying and submission fatigue? Unfortunately, no matter how much publishing does or doesn’t change, one constant is apparently immortal: that perniciously pervasive myth out there that the only reason a manuscript, or even a query, ever has trouble finding a professional home is because of a lack of writerly talent. That is simply not true. Like the common fantasy of walking into a writers’ conference, pitching to the first agent in sight, getting signed on the spot, and selling the book within the month, that misapprehension makes too many good writers stop trying after only a handful of efforts. What is true is that the competition is fierce, and the more a writer learns about how the business works, the more she can hone her queries and submissions to increase their likelihood of success. There is an immense gulf between the difficult and the impossible — and, as I have stressed time and again, the only impossible hurdle for a book to overcome is the one that confines it in a desk drawer, unqueried and unread. No matter how tight the book market becomes, it’s not the industry that controls the lock on that drawer; it’s the writer. Never, ever allow the prospect of rejection to seal that drawer shut permanently. This is your dream — give it a fighting chance. Keep that querying momentum going. One more ‘Palooza is lurking in the wings between now and the solstice, the official end of autumn. Tune in tomorrow for its unveiling — and, now and always, keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-4215" class="post-4215 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-action-scenes category-agency-screeners-pet-peeves-of-the-notorious-variety category-art-of-revision category-author-author-awards-for-expressive-excellence category-beginning-and-ending-a-book category-chapter-headings-and-openings category-character-development-tips category-constructing-a-narrative category-craft-in-depth-analysis category-creating-sufficiently-odious-antagonists category-dialogue-that-adds-to-the-scene category-editing-dialogue category-editing-for-clarity category-editing-the-opening-pages category-first-pages-that-grab category-formatting-manuscripts category-originality-in-manuscripts category-passive-voice-and-why-you-should-eschew-it category-punctuation-and-grammar-of-the-non-standard-variety category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-revision-tips category-secondary-characters category-tag-lines-and-how-to-minimize-them category-what-makes-a-great-page-1 category-writing-advice-truisms category-ya-voice"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/11/30/first-pages-that-grab-janine-southards-which-star-my-destination-4/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2010-11-30T00:00:00+00:00">November 30, 2010</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/11/30/first-pages-that-grab-janine-southards-which-star-my-destination-4/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/#comments">6 Comments on First Pages That Grab: Janine Southard’s Which Star My Destination</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/11/30/first-pages-that-grab-janine-southards-which-star-my-destination-4/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark">First Pages That Grab: Janine Southard’s Which Star My Destination</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Me-Christmas2007-stripeysweater.jpg" alt="Janine Southard author photo" title="Janine Southard author photo" width="235" height="200" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13552"/> Have you been enjoying these last few winning entries in the <a href="/index_p_11293.html">Author! Author! Great First Pages Made Even Better Contest</a>, campers? I have — they’ve been providing us with a great deal of material for discussion, especially about the joys and challenges of writing YA. I’m toying with running a similar contest in January specifically for literary fiction and memoir, so we could have a nice, jolly time delving into the peculiarities of those highly specialized book categories. Hands up, readers who would be interested in that. While you’re giving that some thought, let’s turn to another winner in the YA category, Janine Southard’s WHICH STAR MY DESTINATION. I’ve got to say, by the time I finished reading Janine’s book description, I had already thought of four YA readers for whom I would buy this book for Christmas were it already out. It’s a real grabber of a premise. Take a gander: <blockquote> When high school is over, Zheng still doesn’t know what to do with his life. Worse, his friends are all moving on, following their dreams, and getting off the planet Hartwell. As one last adventure together, Zheng packs up his interstellar automobile — which he modified in his parents’ garage — for a road trip, taking his university-bound friend to college. When he and his best friends reach Luna City, Zheng stumbles across what looks like a scholarship scam, but his investigative mind uncovers the truth…revealing an alien organization quietly preparing the human race for galactic culture. Now Zheng knows what he wants to do: he intends to culturally prepare the aliens for humanity. </blockquote> Yet from the first page of text, it is not entirely clear whether this is a YA book. Why not? See for yourself — and, as always, if you are having trouble reading it, try holding down the COMMAND key and pressing the + key to enlarge the image. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Southard-page-1.jpg" alt="Southard page 1" title="Southard page 1" width="466" height="603" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13570"/> Actually, let’s pause a moment before we consider the content in order to examine this page cosmetically. While this page is very close, it isn’t entirely in standard format for manuscripts: there’s a double-spaced line of empty space missing between the chapter heading and the first line of text, and while the dashes are properly doubled, there should be spaces between each end and the words immediately preceding and following them. Let’s look it again without those distractions, shall we? <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Southard-revision1.jpg" alt="Southard revision1" title="Southard revision1" width="466" height="603" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13579"/> And already, hands have sprouted up all across the galaxy. “But Anne,” the sharper-eyed residents of the universe point out, “you added more space at the top. How on earth did you manage to cram all of the sentences in the original onto the revised page?” Oh, that was easy, galactic nitpickers: I merely eliminated one of the two single-sentence paragraphs. As we have discussed before, in English prose — at least of the non-journalistic variety — it takes at least two sentences to make up a narrative paragraph. So while single-sentence paragraphs are fine in dialogue, Millicent tends to frown at them anywhere else, at least in fiction submissions. (Due to the phenomenon’s ever-increasing prevalence in journalism, she’s less likely to react negatively to them in nonfiction submissions.) The higher the education level of the intended audience, the more negative her reaction will be. So if you like how a single-sentence narrative paragraphs look on the page, and you happen to be writing mainstream, literary, or high-end women’s fiction, you might want to reserve the convention for only those moments when what is revealed in that single sentence is genuinely startling enough to be able to carry its own paragraph. That way, the very rarity of its occurrence will add to its impact. Behind you — aliens! See? Standing all by itself, that statement is much more startling than if it were merely tacked onto the end of the preceding paragraph — or, sacre bleu! buried in the middle of it. A skimming eye (like, say, a weary Millicent’s when screening her 57th page 1 of the day) may well skip lines mid-paragraph, so if an action is important, a piece of characterization essential, or a sentence particularly lovely, you might want to make sure it appears in either the first or the last line of the paragraph. Or, if the information is once-in-a-manuscript important, in its own one-line paragraph. There’s a reason that journalists tend to present the most important planks of their arguments in single-sentence paragraphs: the eye jumps right to ‘em. Speaking of things to which the reader’s eye jumps, did you find all of the capitalization distracting? Most Millicents would have. Obviously, some of it is unavoidable — place and people names do need to sport capital first letters, after all — but some is by choice. Compounding the problem: many of these choices appear quite close to each other in the text. Not sure why that might be distracting for our Millie? Okay, let’s look at the page again, a capitalization-sensitive reader might see it. While I’m at it, I’m going to highlight the word and phrase repetition as well. See if anything in particular jumps out at you: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Janine-repetition-sheet.jpg" alt="Janine repetition sheet" title="Janine repetition sheet" width="466" height="603" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13582"/> There’s a fair amount of word and phrase repetition here — more acceptable in YA than in adult fiction, of course, but still a pet peeve for many Millicents — but I’d like you to focus on the underlined bits in particular. Do you notice anything about them? If you squinted at those little lines and immediately cried, “Wow, that’s quite a few instances of the verb to be,” you get a gold star for the day. That particular verb appears in various forms no fewer than 14 times on this page. 4 of those times are in the first paragraph — and in a type of sentence structure that is an even more common submission red flag. Any guesses? If you pointed to the first few sentences of the story and said, “Hey, those are in the passive voice,” pat yourself on the back sixty-seven times. All of those it was constructions are indeed in the passive voice: instead of actors doing things, the sentences presents things as occurring all by themselves. Again, this is rather more accepted in YA than in adult fiction, and the younger the target reader, the more acceptable the passive voice is deemed to be. (And yes, both of those last two sentences were in the passive voice. Take another gold star out of petty cash.) Unfortunately for lovers of to be and it was, most Millicents — indeed, most professional fiction readers — are explicitly taught that the passive voice is the least creative way of saying, well, almost anything. So opening a book with several instances of it in a row might well raise some professional eyebrows. It is worth noting, however, that the only judges who were not bothered by this were the YA authors. But then, they didn’t mind the single-sentence paragraphs, either. Again: norms vary by book category. If you want to find out what is and is not considered good writing in yours at the moment, there’s just no substitute for going to a well-stocked bookstore on a regular basis, seeking out the shelves devoted to the type of book you write, and plopping yourself down to read the opening pages of some recent releases. Even better, you could buy new releases in your chosen category. Or ask Santa to do it for you, because what’s a better gift than professional development in the career you want most in your heart of hearts to pursue? Did you spot any other potential distractions from the story here? Let’s take a gander at what Millicent might have scrawled in the margins. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Janines-edit1.jpg" alt="Janine's edit1" title="Janine's edit1" width="512" height="665" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13560"/> Ah, at last we are starting to talk about plot and characterization. The story definitely drops the reader into an exciting conflict right away — good move, Janine! — but by YA standards, the description of the environment is rather scanty. YA is known for its vivid, sensual descriptions, but other than that very vivid purple imagery in the first paragraph — again, nice choice, Janine — the reader doesn’t gain a very strong sense of what it feels like to be on Luna. Including just a few more physical details would make all the difference here — and for YA, a great way to do that is through the protagonist’s bodily sensations. Is the gravity heavier on Luna than on Hartwell, for instance, or lighter? Is Does the sunshade affect how plants grow? Are there any plants — and if so, could Zheng be allergic to one of them, because he’s not used to it? Another prime target for descriptive expansion is the crowd. Are the people in the room all humanoid? Are any of them humanoid? Who is the group, and how can Zheng tell that they are the ones in authority — over and above the death threats, that is? Are the con artists restrained in any way? Is he? Are they close enough together to create a distinctive smell, or to increase the heat in the room? And so forth. The possibilities here are practically endless; just remember that unless the narrative gives the reader hints of what the environment and characters looks, sound, smell, taste, etc., the author cannot be certain that every reader will envision the same thing. For some details, it’s fine to let the reader’s imagination run free; for others, it can throw off understanding of the plot. Not sure what the latter might look like in practice? Well, if Zheng’s captors had three arms, when would you want to learn about it, when they first appear in the book, or just after one of them grabs our hero and two other captives as they try to escape? I want to talk about two more pieces of marginalia, then I shall move to the punch line. In the next-to-last paragraph, the narrative between the dialogue indulges in a few devices quite common for a submission, but rare in published books. Here’s the relevant piece of dialogue, ripped out of context for your tag line-considering pleasure: <blockquote> “You know far more than you should, and we must keep you from speaking,” the group’s Speaker proclaimed stiltedly to fidgeting from other swindlers around the room. “We should simply kill you, but we’re peaceful people. I’m not going to start killing now.” She paused, then qualified, “Unless you give me no choice.” </blockquote> Did you spot all three? No? Okay, let’s take them in the order they appear. First, the adverb in the initial tag line, stiltedly, is a trifle awkward — and all the more likely to be noticed as such, because there was an entire generation of English students taught to avoid using adverbs in tag lines at all. Some of you must remember that old writing truism, right? The dialogue itself should demonstrate to the reader just how things were said; lose the -ly words, already. This writing advice is far less common now, and its adherents certainly less vitriolic, than way back in the day, but it was so influential that millions of Baby Boomers ran terrified out of their English classes, absolutely convinced that they should never use adverbs, ever. Why should a writer of today worry about that misconception? Millicent may be the child of one of those students. Or the grandchild. Or — brace yourself — the employee. Just use adverbs with discrimination, okay? Let’s move on to the second issue: what’s going on just after that adverb isn’t completely clear, is it? The causative to construction is fairly common in submissions, used to indicate that what happens after the to was in response to what came before it. Unfortunately, a skimming eye often misses the implication. In a manuscript, then, it’s usually safer to spell out causation. Heck, we can even toss in one of those much-maligned adjectives: <blockquote> “You know far more than you should, and we must keep you from speaking,” the group’s Speaker proclaimed. The swindlers around the room fidgeted uncomfortably. </blockquote> The third issue is a subtle one, but a surprisingly pervasive professional readers’ pet peeve. “Why, in heaven’s name,” Millicent mutters under her breath, “do aspiring writers insist upon telling me every time a speaker hesitates for so much as an instant? In and of itself, it’s seldom either character- or situation-revealing.” It’s pretty clear why Janine chose to insert a pause here — to increase the menace of the threat — but you must admit, Millie has a point. The mere fact of pausing doesn’t add all that much to the speech. If the speaker did something more specifically threatening, the menace in could be heightened considerably. Perhaps even by employing an adverb! <blockquote> “We should simply kill you, but we’re peaceful people. I’m not going to start killing now.” Her ice-gray eyes swept the room contemptuously. “Unless you give me no choice.” </blockquote> Now that your eyes are sharpened to the particulars, I’m going to ask you to step back, consider the overall picture again — and revisit that burning issue from the beginning of the post. Re-read that first page: does this voice and worldview strike you as inherently and necessarily YA? If you’re unsure, ask yourself this question: based upon this page alone, just how old do you think the protagonist is? To the judges’ collective eye, there was no indication here that Zheng was not a full-fledged adult — not the usual choice for the protagonist of a YA book. (Adults drop students off at college all the time, right?) Admittedly, there’s also nothing here that indicates he couldn’t be a teenager, but that might not be enough to stop an impatient Millicent looking to screen out the overwhelming majority of the submissions on her desk that day from huffing, “Oh, this isn’t YA. Next!” Since we liked the voice, the premise, and the leap right into conflict — well done, Janine! — we wanted to flag this problem. It’s one that dogs many a YA submission, particularly now that so many writers of adult fiction have been tempted by the category’s popularity into switching teams, as it were. Out comes the broken record player again: <blockquote> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/broken-record8-150x150.jpg" alt="broken-record8" title="broken-record8" width="150" height="150" class="aligncenter size-thumbnail wp-image-10494"/>YA has its own distinctive conventions, particularly with respect to voice and subject matter. If it is not apparent from the first paragraph of page 1 that a manuscript is YA, even the best-written YA manuscript runs the risk of rejection on that ground alone. </blockquote> Not sure in this case? Take another peek at that first page, then ask yourself: is the central conflict of this scene one to which a teenager could relate? The judges felt — and I concur heartily — that being lectured by an authority figure because one has found out a truth one shouldn’t have might strike teen readers as somewhat familiar. Particularly the part about not speaking up about it. The black-and-white nature of the authority figures’ logic (I’m not going to start killing now… Unless you give me no choice.) would also be more likely to appeal to teenage sensibilities than those of adult readers; in adult fiction, superlatives and extremes tend not to play as well. A different definitional ambiguity troubled the judges in the book category description. In answer to the question how will this manuscript add something new and exciting to its book category? Janine provided the judges with a rather interesting response: <blockquote> Which Star My Destination takes the themes of exploration and road trips to grand scale by involving the entire universe. It also reminds us that, different personalities aside, teenagers are faced with the same situations and feelings, even in the far-flung future. Plus, spaceships! </blockquote> Plus, spaceships! saved this description at judging time, frankly; blanket assertions often raise more questions than they answer in book descriptions. While the notion of a universe-wide road trip was amusing (if rather reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy/dp/0345453743/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1291188172&sr=1-1">The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy</a>), the fantasy writer on the panel was nonplused by the assertion that an exploration story was unusual simply because its extent was intergalactic — that has been a staple of science fiction since its inception, has it not? Other, more historically-minded judges wondered how we could be certain that teenagers in the far future would face the same situations as those today, as it would be difficult to argue that the teenagers of two hundred years ago did, or even the teens of thirty years ago, when feelings-based YA really hit its stride as a book category. Unsure if that’s true? Try reading Paul Zindel’s classic, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pardon-Me-Youre-Stepping-Eyeball/dp/055326690X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1291188609&sr=1-1">Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on My Eyeball</a>; the protagonist’s frequent emotional and even physical abuse of his love interest barely raised eyebrows in 1978, but it would have to be handled as the central problem of the story today. Or E.L. Konigburg’s 1967 Newberry Award-winning <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mixed-up-Files-Mrs-Basil-Frankweiler/dp/1416949755/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1291188748&sr=1-1">From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler</a>, where two children run away from an apparently perfect home to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; if it were written now, there would be some serious problems in that household, and at least one responsible adult would experience some qualms about sending those kids back. Fortunately, the first page was enough of a grabber to cause even the skeptical judges to want to read more — and the book description’s nod to Jerome Beatty, Jr.’s much-loved <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Matthew-Looney-Pirates-Jerome-Beatty/dp/0380008483/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1291189215&sr=1-1">Matthew Looney</a> series brought a smile to many a child of the 1970s’ face. All agreed that the combination was a potentially powerful one. There’s a moral to all of this library-oriented reminiscence, should you care to know it. Any given manuscript will not be the first book in an agent’s chosen book category that she or her staff will have read; if they like those kinds of books enough to devote their lives to representing them, it’s a good bet that everyone concerned has read a wide array of them. Why is that important for a submitter to know? Because in order to wow Millicent the agency screener, a manuscript is not merely competing with the other submissions of recent months; it’s also competing with all the similar books she has ever read. It had better compare favorably. While competing with the classics in one’s genre is a tall order, the writers of today enjoy a considerable advantage: you are aware of today’s cultural expectations (“Wait — the female protagonist is supposed to DO something, not just wait around to be rescued? “YA writers of the 60s and 70s marvel), demographic trends (“Hey, when did living with one’s still-married birth parents stop being the norm?”), and, yes, recent bestsellers. (“Tell me why precisely we’re supposed to find vampirism sexy?”) Current YA writers also reap the benefits of writing during an exciting burgeoning of the category. Boundaries are being pushed; experiments are being wrought, and a diverse array of individual voices of unprecedented complexity is being welcomed. (And yes, all of that was in the passive voice; good eye.) Janine is poised to take advantage of this expansion with a story that seems interesting, exciting — and a whole lot of fun. Just what a road trip should be. Keep pressing those boundaries, everyone — and, as always, keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-2641" class="post-2641 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-action-scenes category-agency-screeners-pet-peeves-of-the-notorious-variety category-art-of-revision category-author-author-awards-for-expressive-excellence category-beginning-and-ending-a-book category-chapter-headings-and-openings category-dealing-with-rejection category-e-mailed-submissions category-editing-the-opening-pages category-first-pages-that-grab category-formatting-manuscripts category-keeping-the-faith category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-rejection-when-they-dont-tell-you-why category-requested-material-wrangling category-revision-tips category-slug-line"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/11/27/first-pages-that-grab-carolin-walz-gothic-wars-or-reading-on-a-jet-plane-2/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2010-11-27T00:00:00+00:00">November 27, 2010</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/11/27/first-pages-that-grab-carolin-walz-gothic-wars-or-reading-on-a-jet-plane-2/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/#comments">13 Comments on First Pages that Grab: Carolin Walz’ Gothic Wars, or, reading on a jet plane</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/11/27/first-pages-that-grab-carolin-walz-gothic-wars-or-reading-on-a-jet-plane-2/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark">First Pages that Grab: Carolin Walz’ Gothic Wars, or, reading on a jet plane</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Carolin-01-716x1023.jpg" alt="Carolin Walz author photo" title="Carolin Walz author photo" width="239" height="341" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-13520"/> Yes, yes, I know: I have not been in the habit of giving subtitles to the prize posts in the <a href="/index_p_11293.html">Author! Author! Great First Pages Made Even Better Contest</a>, but frankly, I felt that my feedback on today’s winning entry, GOTHIC WARS by Carolin Walz, warranted it. Turbulence fought penmanship, and I fear that for the most part, turbulence won. Since this has historically been the fate of many a manuscript whose marginalia was penned on the way to or from a writers’ conference — oh, you can think of a better use of flying time than reading submissions? — I felt that it was only fair to present all of you with the results, so you may recognize travel-skewed comments when the agent of your dreams presents them to you. With the advent of electronic submissions — still not universally accepted, but climbing steadily in popularity — you’d be astonished at how many agents reading submissions on airplanes around this time of year. Specifically, on their electronic readers. Surprised? Or even alarmed at the prospect of your meticulously-formatted pages being read on that small a screen? Well, think about it in practical terms: if you were an agent traveling over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house, which would be more efficient to tote as reading material, a couple of heavy manuscripts — or 30 electronic submissions on your Kindle? Of course, this is only likely to be the case at agencies that accept electronic submissions. And even then, typically, those Grandmother’s house-bound submissions (or, at this point in the weekend, those returning from Grandmother’s) will have had to make it past Millicent the agency screener’s strict scrutiny before making it onto the boss’ Kindle. Which just goes to show you: electronic submissions can be pretty well traveled. Yet all too often, aspiring writers assume, wrongly, that the simple fact that they’ve sent their manuscripts as Word attachments to an e-mail automatically means that everyone who might conceivably read their submission will have access to their contact information. “After all,” these submitters reason, “all Millicent or her boss has to do to say yes to me is to hit the REPLY key. What could be easier than that?” What, indeed? Unless, of course, your electronic submission has been downloaded to an electronic reader. Then, it actually isn’t inconceivable that an agent could fall in love with a manuscript — and yet have no idea how to get in touch with the person who wrote it. Or even be sure who did write it. Scary prospect, is it not? Breathing into a paper bag should reverse that hyperventilation within a couple of minutes. “But Anne,” some of you wheeze, “couldn’t the agent just ask his Millicent to comb through the agency’s e-mail inbox? Surely, my original e-mail would be in there, right?” Possibly, but do you have any idea how many e-mails an agency that accepts electronic submissions receives in any given week? Or even on any given day? Forget about finding a needle in a haystack — Millicent would be looking for a needle in a hay field. Fortunately, this dire extremity is easy to avoid with a little advance preparation on the submitter’s end. First, it’s always a good idea to include one’s full contact information with any submission, electronic or otherwise; don’t you want the agent of your dreams to be able to call you with any follow-up questions she might have? Second, it’s an even better idea to include precisely the same title page a savvy submitter sends along with a paper submission in an electronic submission. How is that possible? It’s not particularly difficult in a Word file: just copy and paste your title page at the top of your manuscript document as its first page. To avoid the title ending up with the slug line that every other page in the manuscript should feature in its top margin, select DOCUMENT from the FORMAT menu in Word, then choose LAYOUT. Click “Different first page.” Then you can just clear the header for the title page, while leaving the rest of the document as is. Ah, I hear some of you murmuring, but doesn’t that mean that the first page of Chapter 1 would be numbered as page 2 in the slug line? (For those of you who are not in fact murmuring that, but instead are wondering what the heck a slug line is, it’s the AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/TITLE/PAGE # that appears in the upper-left corner of a professionally-formatted manuscript. For some visual examples and explanation of how to include this important information correctly on your pages, take a gander at the SLUG LINES ILLUSTRATED category on the archive list at right.) There’s a way around that, too: under the INSERT menu, choose PAGE NUMBERS…, then FORMAT. Under PAGE NUMBERING, simply set the “Start at…” number to 0. Voilà! The second page of the document is now page 1! “Aha!” those of you still breathing crossly into your paper bags gasp. “I’ve got you now, Anne. Why wouldn’t the agent of my dreams simply look at the top of any page of my manuscript to see what my name was? If Millicent misplaced my original e-mail, she could just do a search of her inbox under my last name. Problem solved!” Quite true, oh gaspers — provided that you included a slug line. You would be positively amazed at how many electronic submitters (or, heck, paper submitters) do not. How much difference could the omission possibly make to a submission that did not go astray, you ask? Well, since the fine folks who read manuscripts for a living expect every page of every manuscript to include a slug line, quite a bit. See for yourself. Here is today’s winning entry in the format that the judges first encountered it: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Carolin-Walz-page-1.jpg" alt="Carolin Walz page 1" title="Carolin Walz page 1" width="466" height="603" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13529"/> A bit bare on the top end, isn’t it? Here it is again, properly formatted: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Carolin-revised.jpg" alt="Carolin revised" title="Carolin revised" width="466" height="603" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13530"/> Makes more of a difference than you would have expected, doesn’t it? As does another small formatting change: two spaces after the colon in the Part I designation, rather than the original one. Again, it’s a seemingly small thing, but to eyes sharpened to the norms of professional manuscripts, it would jump out. Some of you former wheezers have your hands in the air now, I see. “But Anne, didn’t you do something else to the formatting? There are more words in the second version, are there not? The last sentence on each page is different.” Well spotted, ex-hyperventilators. The difference between the first page and the second is that the first is in TextEdit, the second Word. About 10% of the entries in this contest arrived in TextEdit, although the rules had specified sending the first page as a Word attachment to an e-mail. The judges decided not to disqualify entrants for this, primarily because it would afford me such an excellent opportunity to talk about why this would not be a good way to submit electronically to an agency or publishing house. Word is, quite simply, the U.S. industry standard — when an agency asks submitters to send pages as attachments to e-mails, they mean a Word attachment. Specifically, a .doc document, not a .docx document, since many agencies are running older versions of Word. (If they are running a really old version of Word, you may have to send your pages as a .rtf document, so they will be able to open it.) You should honor this expectation; send any requested materials in Word, not TextEdit or any other word processing program you happen to favor. The fact that it is possible for a Word user to do as I did, convert a TextEdit document into Word, does not mean that Millicent will necessarily be willing to do it; after all, her boss would not be able to submit your book electronically to an editor at a publishing house that way. A U.S.-based agent would certainly expect any writer it signed to convert all manuscript documents to Word, anyway, so in the long run, it will actually save time to just write your documents in Word in the first place. (If you are unsure how to format a manuscript page in Word, please see the obscurely-titled HOW TO FORMAT A MANUSCRIPT category on the archive list at right. Or just stick around here at Author! Author! for December, when I shall be going over the rigors of standard format again. So dig out your long-harbored formatting questions, people!) Besides, as we saw above, the formatting is not always identical. In a submission where length is an issue — if, say, the manuscript goes over 400 pages, Millicent’s usual oh, dear, that’s a bit on the long side limit in most fiction categories — even those few extra words per page may make an overall difference. Sometimes, standard format is the writer’s best friend. Don’t believe me? Okay, let me ask you: how much time have we spent so far talking about technical and presentation issues in Carolin’s fine first page, and how much about either the writing or the content? THAT’s how distracting these issues are to professional readers. It’s genuinely a pity here, because Carolin has a terrific book concept. Here’s the way she described it to the judges: <blockquote> The historical novel Gothic Wars tells the story of Emperor Justinian’s reconquest of Gothic Italy in the sixth century CE from the point of view of the last Goth king, Teja. It provides a fresh look at a war that is usually seen through the victors’ eyes (like Robert Graves’ Count Belisarius). </blockquote> Interesting, eh? Here’s her 1-page book description. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Gothic-Wars-description.jpg" alt="Gothic Wars description" title="Gothic Wars description" width="466" height="603" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13535"/> Again, fascinating — but once again, we’re distracted by formatting, aren’t we? The slug line contains a first name, sixteen-year-old is not hyphenated (a mistake that I have been seeing more and more over the last couple of years; is this rule not being taught anymore?), and there is odd, additional spacing between the lines. Here’s that page again, with just simple double-spacing: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Walz-description-revised.jpg" alt="Walz description revised" title="Walz description revised" width="466" height="603" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13537"/> Once again, we see what a big difference seemingly small formatting issues can make. Actually, tinkered-with spacing between paragraphs is fairly common in submissions. It puzzles the pros: since just selecting double-spacing under the FORMAT menu (it’s one of the choices under PARAGRAPH) is actually far easier for the writer than manually changing the spacing between the lines, why does anyone go to the extra trouble? It’s not necessary; Word will do it for you. And once again, we’ve been distracted from the engaging story and the writing by technical issues. Let’s see what Millicent would have to say about something other than presentation, shall we? <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Carolins-edit1.jpg" alt="Carolin's edit1" title="Carolin's edit1" width="466" height="603" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13540"/> Hey, I wasn’t kidding about that turbulence. (Don’t worry; the copy I shall send Carolin will be legible.) But as you may see, Millicent’s first instinct was to point out the formatting issues. She also raises an interesting point that affects the marketability of many realistic novels. Carolin has done a beautiful job here of giving the gritty feel of Teja and Gertruda’s quotidian life, hasn’t she? And she does it primarily through showing, not telling: the level of practical detail here is excellent. It’s also quite clear — and this is rarer in historical fiction submissions than any of us might like to hear — that she’s done her homework: as a reader, I believe that these specifics are historically accurate. That’s all going to be great for readers after GOTHIC WARS is published, of course, but it could present a problem at the submission stage. Teja comes across here as an ordinary person, not an extraordinary one. From the synopsis, of course, we know that’s not the case in his life overall. However, as we have seen throughout our discussions of all of our Great First Page Made Even Better winning entries, Millicent tends to make up her mind about whether she wants to follow a protagonist onto page 2 based exclusively on page 1, not the synopsis or brief description in the query letter, a too-ordinary-seeming protagonist may not provide the temptation to read on she wants. Fortunately, this is a very easy fix: Teja merely has to exhibit some extraordinary quality on page 1. If Carolin likes the dramatic arc of having a young boy develop extraordinary qualities over time — as most historical novelists tend to prefer — she can always resort to <a href="/index_p_13486.html">the tactic I suggested for yesterday’s winning post</a>: open with a prologue set later in the book, then revert to this scene after. In historical novels, this strategy often works beautifully. I would be especially pleased to see Carolin try it here, because it’s fairly likely that Millicent will not know much about the wars in question. A well-crafted, informative prologue could go a long way toward convincing her that readers will consider this historical event inherently interesting and important. Hey, it’s not always a foregone conclusion. And Millicent is far more likely to have been an English major than an ancient history concentrator, if you catch my drift. Did you catch the nit-pick in the first line, or did turbulence prevent your being able to read the handwriting? Any guesses why Millicent might ask is it actually necessary to have these two things happen at precisely the same moment? If you immediately shouted, “By Jove, it’s in response to the use of as in that sentence,” take a gold star out of petty cash. X happened as Y happened is an immensely popular sentence structure in novel submissions; one sees it less in published fiction. And that’s a bit surprising to many aspiring writers, because, let’s face it, quite a few things do happen simultaneously in the real world. Why the differential? Because editors have been scrawling in the margins for decades is it actually necessary to have these two things happen at precisely the same moment? Most of the time, it isn’t. Nor is it here: it doesn’t actually add either plot or character development to Carolin’s page 1 that Teja’s rubbing his eyes as Aunt Gertruda gives him the water. If the actions came one after the other, or even if they were reversed, it would not affect the reader’s understanding of what’s going on here, right? The simultaneity implied by as is often not necessary to the reader’s understanding of what is going on; it’s simply the writer’s attempt to be factually accurate about a series of events. But by using this structure when the simultaneous nature of two different happenings is not relevant to the scene, a narrative can both (a) mislead the reader about what actually is important for the reader to notice in the scene and (b) over time, cause the reader to tune out as as an indicator of timing. That last one is problematic, potentially, in a story with a lot of action in it. At some point in the story, it’s going to be vital that the reader understand that X happened as Y happened. So it’s an excellent idea to reserve as, like profanity, for only those moments when it will have the most effect. Let’s see, what else did our Millie flag? How about the Hollywood narration in the second paragraph? We’re all familiar with Hollywood narration, right? It’s a staple of television and movies: one character tells another something they already both know, simply so that the audience may learn it, too. As in: <blockquote> Joyce: Oh, Kent, my husband of twelve years, how glad I am to see you safely home! You know how your job as a test pilot of experimental aircraft frightens me. Kent (chuckling ruefully): Honey, you have been worrying about me since that long-ago day in college when you first saw me slip on the ice-covered library steps and slide head-first onto the quad. You should know by now that my head’s as hard as a rock! Joyce: Well, you’re not the one who is going to have to explain your sudden, fiery demise to our three children — Lara, eight; Timothy, twelve, and little Ghislaine, six — are you? Kent: I suppose not. Nor would I have to face your father, the senator from our fair state, should you become widowed. As you yourself heard me tell not only him, but a crowd of two hundred of our nearest and dearest at our fifth anniversary party — which, as you may in fact recall, was held at Chez Georges, the fanciest French restaurant in town — your well-being and happiness is my highest priority. Joyce: Except, of course, for our children’s. Why, just six months ago, when Lara rode her bike into the side of that truck and you had to rush her to see old Doc Courtland — he who delivered both all of our children and myself — you were magnificent. Kent: So, too, were you that time that our youngest, not yet out of diapers, went wandering off into that cornfield and got kidnapped by aliens. I was so impressed when you… </blockquote> Well, I won’t bore you with what happened after Joyce followed Ghislaine into that field; suffice it to say that the next ten minutes of dialogue concern her many lacerations and burn scars. But why should Joyce and Kent be reminding each other of these major life events at all, when it’s completely beyond the realm of possibility that either party should have forgotten about any of them? Evidently, just so you, dear readers, will know about them, too. Trust me, Millicent will not find this presentation subtle. Which is a shame in this case, where the Hollywood narration is rather subtle: Gertruda might actually have asked this question. However, since this information would also have been perfectly easy to introduce in a couple of narrative sentences — unlike TV and movies, novels do not rely exclusively upon dialogue and visual cues to convey information to their audiences — it’s probably best to err on the side of giving even the implication of Hollywood narration a wide berth. Especially if, as here, it comes with a signpost. Generally speaking, any time a character says, “You know…” there’s an excellent chance that what she is about to say next is Hollywood narration, and thus could be cut. We wouldn’t want to distract Millicent from that nice description in the first paragraph, would we? Or from those evocative details in the last one? So nicely done, Carolin — you’re a set of quite minor revisions away from a genuinely stellar first page. Which is, I hope, precisely why members of the Author! Author! community will find this and our other winning entries both helpful and inspiring: the difference between a manuscript that wows Millicent and one she rejects is often based upon not her overall perception of a manuscript’s writing quality or marketability, but the cumulative effect of a series of small, rather subtle problems that could, with patient revision, be polished away. Keep plugging ahead, Carolin — and everybody, keep up the good work! </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-2642" class="post-2642 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-author-author-awards-for-expressive-excellence category-beginning-and-ending-a-book category-chapter-headings-and-openings category-constructing-a-narrative category-editing-the-opening-pages category-freshness-in-manuscripts category-originality-in-manuscripts category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers category-rejection-when-they-dont-tell-you-why category-strategizing-a-writing-career category-submission-troubleshooting category-tight-third-person-narration"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/11/26/first-pages-that-grab-linda-mccabes-the-legend-of-the-warrior-maid-and-the-saracen-knight/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2010-11-26T00:00:00+00:00">November 26, 2010</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/11/26/first-pages-that-grab-linda-mccabes-the-legend-of-the-warrior-maid-and-the-saracen-knight/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/#comments">3 Comments on First Pages That Grab: Linda McCabe’s The Legend of the Warrior Maid and the Saracen Knight</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/11/26/first-pages-that-grab-linda-mccabes-the-legend-of-the-warrior-maid-and-the-saracen-knight/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/realistic-expectations-for-queriers/" rel="bookmark">First Pages That Grab: Linda McCabe’s The Legend of the Warrior Maid and the Saracen Knight</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/LINDAMCCABE21-300x200.jpg" alt="Linda McCabe author photo" title="Linda McCabe author photo" width="300" height="200" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-13493"/> Before I launch into what I anticipate will be a juicy discussion of today’s winning entry in the <a href="/index_p_11293.html">Author! Author! Great First Pages Made Even Better Contest</a>, I have some good news about a long-time member of the Author! Author! community. Remember memoirist and blogger <a href="http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com/">Shaun Attwood</a>, whose <a href="/index_p_4171.html">guest blog on the difficulties of bringing horrific jail conditions to light</a> moved in last year’s censorship series? If you don’t recall his first guest post here, perhaps you will recall his <a href="/index_p_11310.html">second post last summer</a>, which I introduced by both celebrating the U.K. release of his memoir, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hard-Time-Brit-Americas-Toughest/dp/1845966511/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281068815&sr=8-1">HARD TIME: A Brit in America’s Toughest Jail</a> (Mainstream Press), and bemoaning the fact that although he was writing about his experience in a U.S. jail, his memoir was not available in this country. I am delighted to announce that is about to change: an American edition of HARD TIME will be coming out from <a href="http://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/">Skyhorse Publishing</a> this coming spring. In fact, it is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Time-Sheriff-Americas-Toughest/dp/1616082690/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1290842451&sr=8-2">already available for preorder on Amazon</a>, but so you may recognize it later in brick-and-mortar bookstores, it will look a little something like this: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Attwood-Hard-Time-US-cover.jpg" alt="Attwood Hard Time US cover" title="Attwood Hard Time US cover" width="198" height="303" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13489"/> And that’s not all: somewhat to my surprise, I am writing the introduction for it. Perhaps it is not entirely surprising to all of you, for I have been a tireless booster of Shaun’s writing since I first clapped eyes upon it, shortly after he left his first comment here. Quite apart from the extraordinary subject matter, Shaun’s is a writing success story. As those of you who have been hanging out here at Author! Author! for the last couple of years may recall, Shaun first joined us as a memoirist struggling to write his first book proposal — and as one of the most fascinating bloggers out there on the web. Shortly after he <a href="/index_p_4171.html">shared his extraordinary story with us here</a> he landed an agent and a U.K. book deal. And soon, his story will be available in the land that gave rise to it. Which just goes to show you, campers: it can be done. Congratulations, Shaun! While we’re in a celebratory mood, let’s turn to another long-time member of the Author! Author! community, Linda McCabe. With genre-appropriate fanfare, even. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/knight-shield.gif" alt="knight-shield" title="knight-shield" width="97" height="150" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13503"/><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/knight-shield.gif" alt="knight-shield" title="knight-shield" width="97" height="150" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13503"/><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/knight-shield.gif" alt="knight-shield" title="knight-shield" width="97" height="150" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13503"/><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/knight-shield.gif" alt="knight-shield" title="knight-shield" width="97" height="150" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13503"/> The co-third place winner in the <a href="/index_p_11293.html">Author! Author! Great First Pages Made Even Better Contest</a>, the first page of THE LEGEND OF THE WARRIOR MAID AND THE SARACEN KNIGHT struck the judges as a delightfully traditional addition to the epic fantasy market. At a time when so many fantasy submissions are stuffed to their proverbial gills with trendy paranormal elements — fine in themselves, naturally, but in the fifteenth similar work Millicent the agency screener sees on any given day, bound to seem a trifle on the common side — Linda has made the very interesting choice of grounding her tale’s opening in solid realism. What renders it even more interesting is that the book itself contains a fairly untraditional twist. As Linda’s entry explained to the judges: <blockquote> The Legend of the Warrior Maid and the Saracen Knight is an epic historical fantasy in the time of Charlemagne with a tale of impossible love between sworn enemies. It deviates from traditional quest stories by having the heroine, and not the hero, receive the call to adventure. </blockquote> Piques your interest, doesn’t it? Given that laudable ambition, one would expect the heroine to appear on page 1, right? That actually doesn’t happen here — leading the judges to wonder whether a rushed Millicent would read far enough to realize just how untraditional this traditionally-voiced tale actually is at its core. While the opening page was interesting, evocative, and promised excitement to come, it is very solidly in the tradition (there’s that word again) of male-centered battle epics. Take a gander and judge for yourself. As always, if you are having trouble making out the individual words, try holding down the COMMAND key and pressing + repeatedly to enlarge the image. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/McCabe-page-1.jpg" alt="McCabe page 1" title="McCabe page 1" width="512" height="662" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13498"/> Engaging, certainly, but it doesn’t exactly display its most exotic wares up front, does it? Equally important, if you were the Millicent who requested this manuscript based upon the descriptive paragraph above, would you feel that the page fulfilled the description’s promise? Or even that this book was about the expected protagonist? Pick your jaws off the floor, multiple character-jugglers. Sad but true, 99% of Millicents will simply assume that the first-named character in the manuscript — or at any rate, the primary actor in the opening scene — is the protagonist. So what about this page 1 would alert her that this is a story that stretches the well-established boundaries of battle epics? Unfortunately, nothing. And that’s genuinely a problem, since Linda’s telling quite a story here. Don’t believe me? Okay, take a peek at her synopsis, then glance again at that first page. <blockquote> A love foretold between sworn enemies will determine the fate of Christendom. Bradamante, the niece of Charlemagne, and Ruggiero, a Saracen knight descended from Hector of Troy, are renowned warriors who meet and fall in love on a battlefield before being separated. Bradamante is later sent on a mission to rescue Ruggiero who is being held captive by the wizard Atallah. She learns of dueling magical forces trying to influence which of two prophecies regarding Ruggiero will come to pass. He is either destined to convert to Christianity, marry her, and sire a line of heroes before dying tragically or he will remain a Saracen and bring about the destruction of the Frankish Empire devastating Christendom. Atallah is aware of these divergent prophecies and is determined to protect Ruggiero from harm; he views Bradamante’s love as a threat to Ruggiero’s life. The tale of impossible love between Bradamante and Ruggiero is set against the backdrop of a holy war between Islamic and Christian armies shown in bloody sieges in Marseille and Paris. Other legendary heroes such as Orlando and Renaud de Montauban are featured in this retelling of a classic tale of chivalry, betrayal, revenge and magic. </blockquote> Sounds exciting, eh? But try to wiggle yourself into Millicent’s snow boots for a moment: does it seem as though there’s a slight disconnect between the story as told in the synopsis and the one that appears to be starting on page 1? To put it in another, more positive way, is this page 1 an effective salesperson for the unusual twist on a chivalric romance promised by the synopsis? The judges reluctantly answered these questions no and yes — despite the fact that the writing here is clear (less common in submissions than one might think), the voice category-appropriate, and the opening a good hook into what is to come. Yet with the quirky logic that often dictates which entries end up as finalists and which place in literary contests, the judges decided to include this first page in the winners’ circle precisely because of this inherent marketing tension. The fact is, well-written manuscripts fall into this trap all the time, and it places their work at a significant competitive disadvantage at submission time. By assuming that Millicent will not base her decision on whether to read, say, the truly genre-busting material in Chapter 5 upon her impression of page 1, a submitter runs the risk of having his fascinating premises, characters, and plot elements simply overlooked. Well might you gnash your teeth. “But it’s clear by page 15 how different my story is from what’s currently available in my book category! Heck, by page 31, it’s completely apparent how it is better!” I can well believe it, teeth-gnashers. You wouldn’t believe how many otherwise excellent submissions don’t really get going — or have a terrific opening line — until page 4. Or 14, or 44. But by then, alas, Millicent has probably already made up her mind about what kind of book it is and whether it adds something new to the market. I can feel the laser-like heat of your glares through my computer screen, but it’s far, far better that you hear this from me than have your manuscript rejected on page 1, is it not? So let’s go ahead and coin an axiom on the subject: unless it is pellucidly clear on page 1 what kind of book this is and who will want to read it, even a well-written, book category-appropriate story may get rejected. It’s savvier submission strategy, then, to open the book with the element that you feel is the most marketable, rather than hiding it later in the manuscript. Yes, this may well run afoul of the way you originally envisioned telling the story, but pull it off, and trust me, you’ll bless Linda to your dying day for bringing this subtle submission problem to your attention. Oh, and unless you happen to be writing in a book category where it is not the norm to open the book with a scene centered on the protagonist — which is to say, if you are not writing science fiction, fantasy, thriller, or literary fiction — you might want to structure your book so the first name Millicent sees is your hero/ine’s. Even in those categories, you might consider at least a prologue featuring your protagonist front and center. Hey, Millicent reads a lot of submissions in your chosen book category in any given week. In that vast sea of characters, can you really blame her for wanting to latch onto a protagonist as soon as she possibly can. I heard that. But the proper answer is: no, I can’t. She has a hard job, and honestly, it’s not her fault that she doesn’t have time to read all the way to page 15, let alone 30, to find out how genuinely innovative your premise is. Or how beautifully written that line that would have made a great opening is if it’s hidden on page 6. She’s essentially a treasure-hunter, you know. Make her discovering you a trifle less challenging. The classic means of correcting this problem — and I’m sure you’ve seen this in published novels — is to lift an exciting scene featuring the protagonist from later in the story and open the book with it. Such scenes are often presented as a very brief prologue, sometimes just a couple of pages long. The idea here is to toss the reader directly into the center of a conflict, bring it to the boiling point — then end it abruptly. Appetite whetted, the reader then will proceed to Chapter 1 more or less in its original form. Another means of making your pot of gold shine better: impeccable formatting. There’s actually only a single formatting problem here — did you catch it? No? Okay, let’s see how Millicent would have responded to this page: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Lindas-edit.jpg" alt="Linda's edit" title="Linda's edit" width="512" height="662" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13509"/> What can we learn from this, other than that our Millie’s handwriting can get a trifle wobbly when she’s editing on a plane that’s just hit turbulence? (Don’t worry; I’ll mail Linda a more legible copy.) First, that single-spacing is not appropriate for a subtitle: if Linda simply double-spaced the first line on the page, it would be perfect. Not certain what that would look like on the page? Here you go. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Linda-revised.jpg" alt="Linda revised" title="Linda revised" width="512" height="662" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13512"/> Millie’s turbulence-influenced scrawls also point up a couple fairly standard professional readers’ pet peeves. She’s noted the single-sentence paragraphs at the top and near the bottom of the page, for instance: a narrative paragraph in English prose is made up of at least two sentences, so many a Millicent would have flagged this one. (A single-sentence paragraph is perfectly acceptable in dialogue, of course.) Yes, I know Joan Didion uses single-sentence paragraphs all the time. So do journalists. That doesn’t mean a novelist trying to land an agent for a first book should take the risk. Let’s see, what else? In line 3, she’s crossed out and realized, which actually could have stayed. Any guesses why she recommended cutting this little bit of verbiage? This is a subtle one: in a tight third-person narrative, what is described is generally assumed to be from the protagonist’s perspective — and thus conclusions drawn in the text are assumed to be his. But that’s not the only reason this cut might be a good idea: using short, choppy sentences at moments of stress echoes the breathlessness of surprise. Hey, I wasn’t kidding about it being subtle. There’s another element that might annoy some Millicents, although it clearly did not trouble ours: showing Ruggiero’s thoughts in italics. Some professional readers positively hate this; they feel, and with some justification, that a talented writer should be able to differentiate between thought, speech, and narrative without resorting to funky type. “What’s wrong with he thought?” such Millicents fume — and their boss agents may even have instructed them to fume so. “Or just showing someone calling the guy’s name?” As our Millicent’s leniency on this point demonstrates, however, such fuming is not universal amongst professional readers. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here; tolerance of italicized thought varies from book category to book category, and even agency to agency. Generally speaking, though, the more educated the intended readership, the lower the tolerance for this device. What’s a good test for whether thought italicization acceptable in your chosen book category? Hie yourself to a brick-and-mortar bookstore well stocked in that category and start pulling volumes off the shelves. Not just any books in your category, mind you: stick to ones published within the last three years. If none of the first ten you select feature italicized thought within the first ten pages, I would avoid it. Does this seem like a lot of possible pet peeves for just a first page of text? Actually, in practice, it’s remarkably few: the average submission tends to be rife with potential for Millicent-annoyance. Admittedly, this particularly page 1 promises enough adventurous delights to come that Millie might turn down her annoyance meter a little — and turn to page 2. You know, just to see what happens. And that, my friends, is how you know when a first page is a grabber: when a professional reader can’t wait to get to page 2. The writer won’t be there to see it, of course, but given how many submissions get rejected on page 1, it’s definitely a triumph. Well done, Linda! Best of luck to your warrior princess and her knight. Be sure to tune in tomorrow, when we shall be examining another grabber of a first page. In the meantime, keep up the good work! P.S.: the nifty animation appears courtesy of the fine folks at <a href="http://www.feebleminds-gifs.com/animated-gifs-19.html">Feebleminds</a>. Let’s take another look at it before I sign off for the evening, shall we? <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/knight-shield.gif" alt="knight-shield" title="knight-shield" width="97" height="150" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13503"/><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/knight-shield.gif" alt="knight-shield" title="knight-shield" width="97" height="150" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13503"/><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/knight-shield.gif" alt="knight-shield" title="knight-shield" width="97" height="150" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13503"/><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/knight-shield.gif" alt="knight-shield" title="knight-shield" width="97" height="150" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13503"/> </div> </div> </article> <article id="post-1148" class="post-1148 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-agents category-figuring-out-which-agents-to-query category-finding-agents-to-query category-generating-a-querying-list category-how-to-find-agents-to-query category-querying category-querying-or-submitting-to-us-agencies-from-outside-the-us category-realistic-expectations-for-queriers"> <header class="entry-header"> <div class="entry-meta">Posted on <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/11/18/identifying-agents-to-query-part-x-how-much-does-size-matter-really-2/query-letters-and-how-to-write-them-well/querying/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2010-11-18T00:00:00+00:00">November 18, 2010</time></a> - <a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/11/18/identifying-agents-to-query-part-x-how-much-does-size-matter-really-2/query-letters-and-how-to-write-them-well/querying/#respond">No Comments on Identifying agents to query, part X: how much does size matter, really?</a></div><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/2010/11/18/identifying-agents-to-query-part-x-how-much-does-size-matter-really-2/query-letters-and-how-to-write-them-well/querying/" rel="bookmark">Identifying agents to query, part X: how much does size matter, really?</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="entry"> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/props-for-incredible-shrinking-man.jpg" alt="giant scissors, pencil" title="giant scissors, pencil" width="451" height="600" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6417"/> Well, that was an unexpected blogging hiatus, wasn’t it? I plead ambitiousness: in addition to prepping for this coming Saturday’s at the <a href="http://www.wordsandmusic.org/schedule.html">master class on querying</a> at <a href="http://www.wordsandmusic.org/wordsandmusic.html">Words & Music conference</a> in New Orleans, I have also been gearing up for the close textual analysis component of the third-place prizes in the <a href="/index_p_11293.html">Author! Author! Great First Pages Made Even Better Contest</a>. Since giving feedback on the winning entries is so rightfully time-consuming — and something that I was not originally going to do alone — I’ve kept telling myself, “Oh, you need a few solid hours to devote to this — you can fit that in tomorrow.” Then tomorrow came…and the day after…and before I knew it, a few days had gone by between posts. Sorry about that. I should have a few hours this evening to leap into that much-anticipated close textual analysis. Just in case I get distracted again (what’s the probability?), I wanted to post again this morning on our ongoing topic, how to find agents for your query list. Because, let’s face it, even if you weren’t planning to drop by the <a href="http://hotelmonteleone.com/">Hotel Monteleone</a> Saturday afternoon at 3:30 p.m. for a crash course in querying, there’s nothing like talking about what kind of agent is right for your book to get one’s momentum going for that end-of-the-year querying push. You were planning an end-of-the-year querying push, were you not? Or a beginning-of-next-year one? If not, why not? Last time, I mentioned that, contrary to popular belief amongst aspiring writers, a great big agency is not necessarily the best choice for any particular book project, 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 this morning pondering 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, a writer does 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, by the way, if you intend to stick with this 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 concurs an agent’s literary tastes to buy books from several of his or her clients. Which makes a certain amount of empirical sense, right? 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 an editor at HarperCollins 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 just can’t be sold anymore. What this usually means is that he would have trouble selling it to his already-established editorial connections. How is a savvy querier to find out what connections any given agent has? Chant it with me now, long-time readers: research. And I’m not just talking about plugging a book category into a search engine or Googling literary agency, either: I mean going through the standard agency guides, reading carefully through agency websites, checking the acknowledgements pages of first and second books by authors in your category. In order to track down who might be able to sell a book like yours right now, you will — wait for it — need to find out who has been selling books like yours recently. At a big, well-established agency, this information is usually pretty easy to track down: my great big agency, for instance, simply lists its clients on its website (although the list is not always current). With a new agency, it can be harder to assess connection claims until a track record of sales has been established. Don’t write off an agency just because it is new or small, however. As I mentioned last time, 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. At the moment, there seem to be many more new agencies than usual; since the economic downturn, quite a few agents have been branching off on their own. (This is one reason why, in case you were wondering, I like the <a href="http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/">Publishers Marketplace</a> 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.) That can be a good thing for a querying writer: often, new agencies are actively seeking out new clients. As are, typically, junior agents even at large agencies, so don’t overlook the young and the hungry. The hungry can be excellent gambles — they are often more energetic in pursuing sales. Even if a relatively new agent does not appear to have a long solo track record, check her bio: a lot of junior agents were formerly assistants at large agencies. (Or even Millicents. Hey, everyone has to begin somewhere.) An former assistant may well walk into her first solo gig with some pretty good connections already established. She may well be more open to first-time authors than her better-known counterparts. In fact, she may be counting on discovering the next Great American Novel in her inbox — and with good reason: 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. So f 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 frequently after as well), 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 discussions of fee-charging agencies, or you are unfamiliar with how much freelance editing can cost, you might want to check out the relevant categories on the archive list 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. Some years back, I received simultaneous 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. Mountains of it, in fact. 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 lengthy 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, guiding you through its steps, 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 (or did before the economic downturn), 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 ended 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 was, to put it mildly, somewhat overworked — and ended up moving on to become a full agent at another agency within the next year or two. She’s so successful now that she is no longer accepting new clients. 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. 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. Again, chant it with me now, campers: 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. 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Author! Interview videos</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1780"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/pnwa-resident-writer-columns/">*PNWA Resident Writer columns</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-985"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/">*Start here if you are a beginner at trying to get published</a> <ul class='children'> <li class="cat-item cat-item-873"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/the-rules-for-posting-comments-at-author-author/">— The rules for posting comments at Author! Author!</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1364"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/so-why-arent-you-published/">"So why aren't you published?"</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1362"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/why-january-isnt-necessarily-the-best-time-to-act-upon-your-new-years-resolution-to-query-or-submit/">*Why January isn't necessarily the best time to act upon your New Year's resolution to query or submit</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1251"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/a-one-post-guide-to-what-a-book-manuscript-should-look-like/">A one-post guide to what a book manuscript should look like</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-956"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/help-im-scared-to-send-out-the-pages-that-agent-requested/">Help! I'm scared to send out the pages that agent requested!</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-928"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/how-are-book-manuscripts-different-from-published-books/">How are book manuscripts different from published books?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1229"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/if-you-read-only-one-post-on-author-author-this-should-be-it/">If you read only one post on Author! Author — this should be it</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-484"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/if-you-read-only-one-post-on-querying-this-should-be-it/">If you read only one post on querying — this should be it</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-194"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/new-years-resolutions-on-writing/">New Year's resolutions on writing</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-151"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/query-letters-for-beginners/">Query letters for beginners</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1113"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/the-manuscript-formatting-rules/">The manuscript formatting rules</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-879"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/what-is-conference-pitching-and-why-would-i-want-to-do-it/">What is conference pitching and why would I want to do it?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-979"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/what-should-my-submission-look-like/">What should my submission look like?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-562"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/why-are-author-author-posts-so-long/">Why are Author! Author! posts so long?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1381"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/why-are-the-explanations-here-at-author-author-so-extensive/">Why are the explanations here at Author! Author! so extensive?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-372"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/why-are-there-so-many-different-sets-of-writing-rules-online/">Why are there so many different sets of writing rules online?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-488"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/why-is-there-so-much-conflicting-advice-about-queries/">Why is there so much conflicting advice about queries?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-201"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/why-shouldnt-i-just-query-every-agent-i-can-find/">Why shouldn't I just query every agent I can find?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1348"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/why-you-might-not-want-to-send-out-requested-pages-immediately-after-a-successful-pitch/">Why you might not want to send out requested pages immediately after a successful pitch</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1387"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/why-you-should-be-making-regular-backups-of-your-writing/">Why you should be making regular backups of your writing</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1292"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/start-here-if-you-are-a-beginner-at-trying-to-get-published/why-you-should-not-submit-your-manuscript-the-second-after-you-finish-drafting-it/">Why you should not submit your manuscript the second after you finish drafting it</a> </li> </ul> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-940"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/academic-writing/">Academic writing</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-594"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/adding-complexity-to-a-plot/">Adding complexity to a plot</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1724"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/advances-and-how-they-do-and-dont-work/">Advances and how they do (and don't) work</a> <ul class='children'> <li class="cat-item cat-item-773"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/advances-and-how-they-do-and-dont-work/advances/">Advances</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1389"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/advances-and-how-they-do-and-dont-work/is-it-okay-to-ask-agents-at-conferences-how-much-of-an-advance-a-book-like-mine-might-garner/">Is it okay to ask agents at conferences how much of an advance a book like mine might garner?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1061"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/advances-and-how-they-do-and-dont-work/may-i-reasonably-expect-my-advance-to-permit-me-to-take-time-off-work-to-promote-my-book/">May I reasonably expect my advance to permit me to take time off work to promote my book?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-543"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/advances-and-how-they-do-and-dont-work/may-i-reasonably-expect-the-advance-on-my-first-book-to-be-large-enough-to-enable-me-to-quit-my-day-job-and-write-full-time/">May I reasonably expect the advance on my first book to be large enough to enable me to quit my day job and write full time?</a> </li> </ul> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1375"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after-youve-received-a-request-for-pages-as-an-exclusive/">After you've received a request for pages as an exclusive</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1721"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/">After…</a> <ul class='children'> <li class="cat-item cat-item-532"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-a-publisher-has-decided-to-publish-your-book/">After a publisher has decided to publish your book</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-261"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-an-agent-has-said-no/">After an agent has said no</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-770"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-an-agent-makes-an-offer/">After an agent makes an offer</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-959"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-an-agent-or-editor-has-asked-for-an-exclusive-look-at-your-work/">After an agent or editor has asked for an exclusive look at your work</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-358"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-an-editor-decides-to-acquire-a-book/">After an editor decides to acquire a book</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1052"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-you-have-published-the-first-book-in-a-series/">After you have published the first book in a series</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-848"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-you-have-published-your-first-book-what-then/">After you have published your first book — what then?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-204"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-you-have-queried-or-pitched/">After you have queried or pitched</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-688"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-you-land-a-publisher/">After you land a publisher</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-359"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-you-land-an-agent/">After you land an agent</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-205"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-you-receive-a-request-for-pages/">After you receive a request for pages</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-790"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-you-submit/">After you submit</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-206"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-youve-been-rejected/">After you've been rejected</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1152"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-youve-finishing-writing-your-first-draft/">After you've finishing writing your first draft</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-554"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-youve-made-a-successful-pitch/">After you've made a successful pitch</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1220"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/after-youve-made-an-unsuccessful-pitch/">After you've made an unsuccessful pitch</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-556"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/getting-that-submission-out-the-door/">Getting that submission out the door</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-961"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/help-ive-granted-an-agent-an-exclusive-and-another-agent-just-asked-to-see-pages/">Help! I've granted an agent an exclusive and another agent just asked to see pages!</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-647"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/time-between-sale-publication/">Time between sale & publication</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1201"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/what-happens-after-a-memoirist-sells-a-book-proposal/">What happens after a memoirist sells a book proposal</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-235"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/what-happens-when-a-writer-sends-out-a-manuscript-too-soon/">What happens when a writer sends out a manuscript too soon</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-787"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/what-if-more-than-one-agent-asks-to-see-my-manuscript/">What if more than one agent asks to see my manuscript?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-665"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/what-not-to-say-to-an-agent-interested-in-your-work/">What NOT to say to an agent interested in your work</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1095"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/what-to-ask-an-agent-who-offers-to-represent-you/">What to ask an agent who offers to represent you</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-685"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/after/why-its-usually-prudent-to-wait-a-few-days-before-responding-to-revision-suggestions/">Why it's usually prudent to wait a few days before responding to revision suggestions</a> </li> </ul> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1729"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agencies-and-how-to-work-with-them/">Agencies and how to work with them</a> <ul class='children'> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1098"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agencies-and-how-to-work-with-them/agency-contracts/">Agency contracts</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-240"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agencies-and-how-to-work-with-them/being-an-agents-dream-client/">Being an agent's dream client</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-882"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agencies-and-how-to-work-with-them/deal-memos/">Deal memos</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-680"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agencies-and-how-to-work-with-them/my-agent-has-asked-me-to-send-multiple-copies-of-my-manuscript-how-do-i-ship-it/">My agent has asked me to send multiple copies of my manuscript — how do I ship it?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-983"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agencies-and-how-to-work-with-them/what-an-agent-means-by-a-book-proposal/">What an agent means by a book proposal</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-567"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agencies-and-how-to-work-with-them/what-an-agent-will-expect-a-new-client-to-know-about-the-publishing-industry-a-crash-course/">What an agent will expect a new client to know about the publishing industry — a crash course</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-258"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agencies-and-how-to-work-with-them/what-an-agent-will-expect-your-manuscript-to-look-like/">What an agent will expect your manuscript to look like</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-259"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agencies-and-how-to-work-with-them/what-an-agent-will-expect-your-query-to-look-like/">What an agent will expect your query to look like</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-684"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agencies-and-how-to-work-with-them/what-if-my-agent-wants-me-to-revise-my-manuscript-before-she-submits-it/">What if my agent wants me to revise my manuscript before she submits it?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1746"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agencies-and-how-to-work-with-them/why-you-should-make-backups-before-you-send-a-manuscript-to-an-agent-or-editor/">Why you should make backups before you send a manuscript to an agent or editor</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-703"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agencies-and-how-to-work-with-them/working-well-with-an-agent/">Working well with an agent</a> </li> </ul> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-239"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agency-guides/">Agency guides</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-275"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agents/">Agents</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1723 current-cat-parent current-cat-ancestor"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/agents-landing-the-right-one-for-your-book/">Agents – landing the right one for your book</a> <ul class='children'> <li class="cat-item cat-item-262"><a 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cat-item-470"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/author-bio/">Author bio</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-502"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/author-photo/">Author photo</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1068"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/author-readings-and-why-you-should-attend-them/">Author readings and why you should attend them</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-388"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/author-author-awards-for-expressive-excellence/">Author! 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cat-item-1331"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/book-categories/how-specific-should-i-be-about-my-books-category-in-my-query/">How specific should I be about my book's category in my query?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-404"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/book-categories/how-to-figure-out-your-books-category/">How to figure out your book's category</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-931"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/book-categories/should-i-indent-the-first-paragraph-of-a-chapter-if-published-books-in-my-chosen-genre-sometimes-do-not/">Should I indent the first paragraph of a chapter if published books in my chosen genre sometimes do not?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1120"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/book-categories/should-i-mention-the-book-category-on-my-title-page/">Should I mention the book category on my title page?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-422"><a 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Read this post before you mail off that entry!</a> </li> </ul> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1711"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/contests-that-are-worth-your-time-to-enter/">Contests that are worth your time to enter</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-564"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/copyright-issues/">Copyright issues</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1658"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/">Craft and plenty of it</a> <ul class='children'> <li class="cat-item cat-item-425"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/action-scenes/">Action scenes</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-533"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/at-the-risk-of-repeating-myself/">At the risk of repeating myself…</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-808"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/avoiding-killing-your-darlings/">Avoiding killing your darlings</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-426"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/backstory-and-how-to-work-it-into-a-plot/">Backstory and how to work it into a plot</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-389"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/beginning-and-ending-a-book/">Beginning and ending a book</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-615"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/building-suspense/">Building suspense</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-534"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/but-i-like-that-phrase-why-shouldnt-i-use-it-twice/">But I like that phrase! 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Why should I worry about a reader's reaction?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-428"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/character-blurring/">Character blurring</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-809"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/character-naming/">Character naming</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1401"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/cliche-avoidance/">Cliché avoidance</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1045"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/comic-voice-and-how-to-develop-it/">Comic voice and how to develop it</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-639"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/conflict-building/">Conflict-building</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-163"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/consistency-and-why-it-is-important-to-develop/">Consistency and why it is important to develop</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-392"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/constructing-a-narrative/">Constructing a narrative</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1064"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/continuity-and-why-it-is-important-to-maintain/">Continuity and why it is important to maintain</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-394"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/craft-in-depth-analysis/">Craft! 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class="cat-item cat-item-605"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/narrative-consistency/">Narrative consistency</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-434"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/pacing-a-scene/">Pacing a scene</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-626"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/passive-protagonists/">Passive protagonists</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-728"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/passive-voice-and-why-you-should-eschew-it/">Passive voice and why you should eschew it</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-520"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/plausibility/">Plausibility</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-627"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/plot-development/">Plot development</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-407"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/protagonist-likability/">Protagonist likability</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-408"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/protagonist-memorability/">Protagonist memorability</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-514"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/real-stories-told-as-fiction/">Real stories told as fiction</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-436"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/realistic-dialogue/">Realistic dialogue</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1158"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/reimagining-a-classic-tale/">Reimagining a classic tale</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1178"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/run-on-sentences-and-why-professional-readers-dont-like-them/">Run-on sentences and why professional readers don't like them</a> 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cat-item-623"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/suspense-building/">Suspense-building</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-624"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/tense-switching/">Tense-switching</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-642"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/tension-building/">Tension-building</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-992"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/the-end/">The End</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-419"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/vivid-details/">Vivid details</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-420"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/voice/">Voice</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1342"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/what-are-the-proper-ways-to-format-thought-in-a-manuscript/">What are the proper ways to 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href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/writing-on-dark-topics/">Writing on dark topics</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-592"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/writing-the-real/">Writing the real</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1733"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/craft-and-plenty-of-it/writing-the-unreal/">Writing the unreal</a> </li> </ul> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-632"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/dark-comedy/">Dark comedy</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1175"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/dated-references/">Dated references</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1369"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/de-facto-exclusives/">De facto exclusives</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1370"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/de-facto-exclusives-and-why-they-are-a-bad-idea/">De facto exclusives and why they are a bad idea</a> </li> <li 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What's that?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-397"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/editing-dialogue/">Editing dialogue</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1726"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/editing-your-own-manuscript/">Editing your own manuscript</a> <ul class='children'> <li class="cat-item cat-item-651"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/editing-your-own-manuscript/editing-fantasy/">Editing fantasy</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-164"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/editing-your-own-manuscript/editing-for-clarity/">Editing for clarity</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-430"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/editing-your-own-manuscript/editing-for-complexity/">Editing for complexity</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-398"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/editing-your-own-manuscript/editing-for-freshness/">Editing for freshness</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-633"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/editing-your-own-manuscript/editing-for-humor/">Editing for humor</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-431"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/editing-your-own-manuscript/editing-for-length/">Editing for length</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1167"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/editing-your-own-manuscript/editing-for-logical-flow/">Editing for logical flow</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-432"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/editing-your-own-manuscript/editing-for-pacing/">Editing for pacing</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-601"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/editing-your-own-manuscript/editing-for-plausibility/">Editing for plausibility</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1056"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/editing-your-own-manuscript/editing-for-self-publishing/">Editing for self-publishing</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-165"><a 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href="https://www.annemini.com/category/nonfiction/introductions-and-prologues/">Introductions and prologues</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1117"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/nonfiction/my-book-has-a-subtitle-how-should-it-appear-on-the-title-page/">My book has a subtitle — how should it appear on the title page?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-577"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/nonfiction/narrative-nonfiction/">Narrative nonfiction</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-310"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/nonfiction/nonfiction-contest-entries/">Nonfiction contest entries</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-454"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/nonfiction/nonfiction-marketing/">Nonfiction marketing</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-877"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/nonfiction/nonfiction-pitching/">Nonfiction pitching</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-311"><a 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cat-item-1340"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/pitching-to-an-agent/but-i-made-a-connection-with-that-agent/">But I made a connection with that agent!</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-209"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/pitching-to-an-agent/but-ive-heard/">But I've heard…</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-1212"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/pitching-to-an-agent/do-i-need-to-memorize-my-pitch/">Do I need to memorize my pitch?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-965"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/pitching-to-an-agent/does-a-successful-pitch-mean-that-i-cant-query-or-submit-to-anyone-else/">Does a successful pitch mean that I can't query or submit to anyone else?</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-827"><a href="https://www.annemini.com/category/pitching-to-an-agent/elevator-speech/">Elevator speech</a> </li> <li class="cat-item cat-item-829"><a 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