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Time is not on our side

Hello, readers —

 

I’m posting a little bit late today; I’ve been spending the afternoon wrestling with a doozy of an editing problem. Seems one of my clients’ publishers has moved up her revision deadline by a few months. Not weeks, months. As in it’s practically now.

She was informed of it blithely, in the context of an e-mail about something else entirely, as though the news weren’t of completely-rearrange-several-people’s-foreseeable-futures importance. And, like so many writers, the author thought that the fact that she and I were going to have to drop everything and work like demented fiends for the next few weeks changing the book from front to back was HER fault. HER plans were disrupted, and she apologized to ME.

As I’ve said before, writers tend to be very sweet people.

But isn’t it lucky that the publication date on MY book has been pushed back to May? If everything had gone as planned with my memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK, I would have started a book tour in February. (It most emphatically did NOT go as planned: the acquiring editor was laid off at the end of August; my publisher and I spent months living under threat of a groundless lawsuit — long story, but the short version is that it’s perfectly legal to tell the truth — and the release of the movie version of Philip’s wonderful novel A SCANNER DARKLY was pushed back from winter to summer, throwing off marketing schedules entirely.) The mind boggles at how I would have managed to be promoting one book and crash-editing another simultaneously.

But that’s the reality of the publishing world. The writer is left to wait in nail-gnawing suspense for weeks or months at a time, while decisions are made behind closed doors that are usually, from the point of view of those of us writers who call the PNW home, 3000 miles away. Then, BANG! All of a sudden, the writer is presented with a short deadline, and panic reigns supreme until the need of the moment is met. Then that eerie silence returns, until a few days before the next deadline.

I wish I were making this up. I also wish that more aspiring writers knew just how different the sense of time is in Manhattan-based publishing houses and agencies than it is, well, here. Agents and editors’ attitudes and beliefs necessarily affect writers’ lives profoundly; when a fledgling writer doesn’t know what is common practice in her new-found profession and what is not, it is all too easy for her to blame herself, her book, the market, anything but an alternative sense of time for the fact that she’s either ignored or badgered, with little in between.

The Manhattanites themselves would be the last to explain it to you. It just wouldn’t occur to them. Constant rush, being too busy to attend to anything but the most pressing matters on their desks, and living in constant danger of falling behind schedule are all normal; what calls for elucidation?

So if the hapless West Coast writer asks why, for instance, a revision assignment could not have been given a reasonable amount of time in advance, rather than a week before the book goes to press (yes, it happens; I once had a client whose work was actually yanked out of the print queue at the last moment for because her editor decided that the running order needed to be changed, a snap decision that ended up delaying the release of the book by six full months), agents and editors will just repeat the question, puzzled. “Why don’t we plan things in advance?” they echo. “We don’t have time for that.”

Now, this is frankly foreign to most of us PNW-based writers, isn’t it? 150 years ago, Seattle did not even exist; the pioneer spirit still lingers in the air enough for us to appreciate starting a project from scratch and staying with it for the long haul. After all, you don’t chop down a huge tree with a single stroke of an axe (don’t worry; I’m picturing a farmed one, not old-growth), any more than you write a whole book in a single week. We have long, languid, misty winters: for half the year, staying inside to revise makes a lot of sense. What’s the rush?

Try to explain this to your NYC-based agent or editor, and she’ll instantly picture you laden with love beads, dancing around with a tambourine to some old Cat Stevens tune at a love-in. Or possibly on a beach, playing hackysack or tossing a Frisbee to a golden retriever with a blue bandana tied rakishly around his neck while your friends sing “Sunshine On My Shoulders” from atop their surfboards.

It’s not going to be pretty, that image, and it’s not going to make you look like a professional — which is to say, like a New Yorker.

But we’re adaptable people, we Pacific Northwesterners — another legacy of the pioneer days — and when in Rome, we keep time as the Romans do. So most of us try very hard to adapt ourselves to NYC-based agents and editors’ hyped-up senses of time. Presented with their expressions of urgency, we overnight manuscripts — then wait, perplexed, while they gather dust in agency mailrooms. We will lose sleep for days on end in order to complete the chapters that editor at a conference asked to see — and then convince ourselves, when the editor doesn’t respond for months, that something about the chapters caused the delay. We will use up all of our sick leave at our day jobs to revise our novels radically in accordance with our new agents’ requests — and then, the following season, talk ourselves out of calling the agency to ask why the revised version has not been submitted to any editors yet. We don’t want to seem pushy.

All of these are real examples, by the way, the actual experiences of good writers I know. And all occurred within the last six months.

I think there’s a translation problem here, frankly. In our neck of the woods, when someone says he needs something now, he generally means NOW. It’s considered a little rude to demand instant responses when there’s no imminent threat. Perhaps this is another pioneer holdover: when confronted by a hungry coyote, for instance, or a surly mountain lion snarling in one’s back forty, one’s sense of urgency in requesting assistance tends to be genuine. Vigilante “justice” tended to be rather prompt, and “Timber!” implied the hope that the hearer would, as the expression went, hightail it out of the path of that tree. Otherwise, our forebears, like us, preferred to take their time.

From the POV of those who inhabit the NYC publishing industry, however, such attitudes imply a certain lack of vim. Laid-back tends to translate, in their eyes, to “I really don’t care about what’s going on.” Because on their own turf, expressions of temporal urgency tend to be indicative of either eagerness or general stress levels, rather than actual imminence of disaster.

In short, “Timber!” there means that a tree might fall eventually.

So that agent who asked you at last year’s conference to overnight your entire manuscript (at a cost that, if it did not make you mortgage your home, at least made you reconsider your children’s college prospects), she actually meant it as a COMPLIMENT. “I am excited about your work,” this request said, “and because I, like my compatriots, believe that anything worth having is the object of fierce competition, I need to impress you with the intensity of my enthusiasm. Thus, while I do not plan to clear my schedule tomorrow — nor, indeed, any time soon — in order to read the work I am asking you to overnight to me, I am conveying that I am serious about wanting to see it.”

This is why I — and my clients, when they listen to me — never, ever overnight anything to NYC agents or editors unless THEY pay for it. There have literally never been any negative ramifications for this stand. Priority Mail always works just fine, at a fraction of the cost. Plus, USPS’ standard small boxes — which the post office will give you for free! — provide lovely protection for tender manuscript pages.

This is not to say that I ignore last-minute editorial deadlines, or advise others to do so — I don’t, and you shouldn’t. I am in fact a regular user of my publishing house’s FedEx account. But I do try to negotiate, to make the deadlines a trifle more reasonable — and whenever I have an opportunity to set my own deadlines, as does happen occasionally, I automatically add anywhere from two days to two weeks to my estimate, just to ward off last-minute nagging while I’m polishing off the piece. (Trust me, no one ever objects to receiving work BEFORE a deadline.)

And I do keep in mind that the sense of urgency I am hearing over the phone or reading via e-mail may or may not have ANYTHING to do with the project at hand. Instead, I try to remember that the “I need it NOW!” being barked at me may well be a function of the stress levels of an underpaid assistant’s being yelled at by an overcommitted boss working in a building of similarly rushed people in an environment where a state of constant deadline panic is considered normal. In a town where being ultra-busy is considered an indicator of success, I tell myself, the people demanding that I drop everything are just paying me the compliment of assuming I have a life successful enough to disrupt.

So I take a deep breath, look out the window, and remind myself that from my studio, I can see more trees than there are in the entirety of Central Park. I center myself, think what a privilege it is to be asked to share my thoughts (or, as today, to midwife my clients’) for publication, and feel grateful that I had the foresight to invest in a good ergonomic set-up.

Then I punch a sofa pillow viciously seventeen times, clear my schedule, and meet the damned deadline.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

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Starting afresh

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everybody! I know it’s common to reduce all of the Reverend Dr.’s accomplishments to the March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech (leaving out, say, the fact that he held the world’s record as most prolific registrar of voters for at least two decades), but if you are interested in good rhetorical writing, do yourself a favor and find a compilation of his other writings. He was, among other things, an extremely talented writer, and I don’t think he gets enough credit for it.

 

I have been working on the early chapters of my next novel (an involved comedy set at Harvard, my undergraduate alma mater), and it has made me think about the question of being a single book author rather than a career writer. It’s not much of an issue while you’re writing your first book: then, the book IS your writing career.

 

But once you’ve completed the first to your own satisfaction, you need to confront some uncomfortable questions: okay, how does this book fit into my long-term writing plans? Is it representative of the kind of writer I want to be, or is it really a stepping-stone to the kind of book I’d actually prefer to write? And, always: what do I do for my next trick?

 

It is a common prejudice to regard authors who have not published yet as something other than “real” writers, an attitude that makes me apoplectic. “Real” writers, it is argued, are those who have books physically present in bookstores, who not only get paid for their writing, but actually make a living at it. “Real” writers, in short, are the ones on the bestseller lists, not the ones writing their hearts out in the solitude of their lonely rooms.

 

In other words, the people who use this term this way know absolutely nothing about the current writers’ market.

 

As anyone who has tried to market a book is very well aware, it can take YEARS to move successfully from the writing stage of a project to the point where the book is available for sale. Every writer, regardless of talent, has to move through the stages of writing the book, revising the book, finding an agent (unless you decide to go with a small publisher, or self-publish), selling the book to a publisher, rewriting the book to the publisher’s satisfaction, guiding the book through the IMMENSELY intricate byways of the average publishing house, promoting the book, and finally, building a fan base.

 

This is not a world, whatever the advocates of “real” writers say, where talent is instantly recognized, and a project is still warm from the author’s printer when she’s signing autographs at Barnes and Noble. In fact, as you may already be aware, finding an agent who is a good match with the work is a step that has taken many, many good writers two, five, ten, fifteen years – writers whose work has subsequently climbed the bestseller lists, won important awards, and charmed countless readers’ hearts.

 

I mention this, because I thought some of you could use a pep talk right about now. Since the NYC publishing world simply shuts down between Thanksgiving and the New Year, and agencies are swamped with New Year’s resolution queries and tax paperwork for last year’s sales for most of January, I would imagine that a lot of you are on pins and needles, awaiting replies. What you are doing is a necessary and laudable step of the process; it takes real courage to submit your work to total strangers with the power of life and death over it, and still more to keep submitting it after it has been rejected.

 

Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not a real writer while you’re going through this process. Going through this process is precisely what real writers do, and the only genuine criterion for evaluating a writer is the quality of the writing. Period.

 

That being said, I return to the issue of the writing career. The vast majority of writers simply stop writing while they are marketing their first books, and no wonder. It takes a heck of a lot of energy to keep churning out queries personalized to each agency, crafting pithy synopses, and perfecting those first fifty pages that will wow the first agent who asks to see them. There are days when it takes almost too much energy to open the mailbox, to check for an acceptance or rejection. Be nice to yourself – this is emotionally difficult stuff.

 

However, if you truly do want a writing career, rather than a single success, it is vital that you not become so focused on the book you’re marketing that you neglect the next one. It’s always a good idea to have one in the pipeline.

 

And the more successful your first book is, the more crucial your next work will be. If you write genre fiction, you should plan on having another book completed within six or nine months of signing the contract on your first, as to be considered a successful genre writer, you will be expected to produce a new book every year and a half or so. If you write mainstream or literary, your name recognition will start to fade after a couple of years, so you will want to follow up as soon as you can. And if you write nonfiction, I can tell you from experience that your agent and editor will be asking you about your next project before you finish your first.

 

Funny, isn’t it? Before you sign with an agent or sell a book, it’s hard to get anyone in the industry to spend a few minutes reading your work, but after you’ve exhausted yourself pushing that work over the finish line, you’re expected to bounce to your feet and begin writing again instantly.

 

If you already have your next book partially finished or even completed, your life will be much, much easier later on, particularly in the year or two after you sign your first publication contract. (Remember, the months after you sign will be taken up with revision, so you may not have time to work on the next project then.) I know it’s tiring even to contemplate, but if you can be working on your next book while you are marketing the first, you will be doing precisely what successful writers do: keeping your career moving.

 

I hear some of you saying: wait a gosh-darned minute. I’ve been moving heaven and earth to scrape out the time to write my first book while working full-time (or, even more difficult, while raising kids full-time). Even if I didn’t take a well-deserved rest after finishing my book, I had planned to use my advance to support me while I wrote my next. If I already have notes on my next book, will that be good enough?

 

True, most books are not published until at least a year after the contract is signed – which means, in practical terms, that the final installment of your advance will be quite some time away. (Advances are typically paid in three installments: a third when the contract is signed, a third when the publisher accepts the book – i.e., after you have made all of the revisions your editor has asked you to make – and a third upon publication.) Unless your advance is very, very large indeed (as first-time authors’ advances seldom are), it is unlikely that a fraction of your advance will be large enough to support you for very long.

 

And I hate to be the one to tell you this, but even after your royalties exceed your advance amount, and you start receive straightforward royalty payments, it may be awhile before you get them. Some publishing houses are notoriously slow at passing along royalties – usually, contracts specify that they need pay them either when they exceed a certain set amount, or every six months, whichever comes first.

 

In other words, I wouldn’t count on your first book sale being able to take over your mortgage payments right away.

 

I know, I know, this isn’t the happy story we writers so often hear about overnight successes, but the fact is, most of the stories we hear are quite old, back in the heady pre-1990s days when editors would fall in love with a first novel, sign the author to a three-book contract, and hand over enough money that the author could devote himself (or, more rarely, herself) to her muse. You remember those days: it was the time when you would get all excited about a first novel, gleefully snatch up the author’s next as soon as it could be rushed into print – and never hear of that author again.

 

The reason for this was simple: authors used to struggle for years, perfecting that first book, and then their publishers would rush them into the second to try to maintain the momentum of the first. That’s why those second books so often seemed hastily-written; if the authors had not been writing all through the (back then, usually much shorter) agent-finding stage, the need to get the next book out the door sent them into a panic.

 

For this reason, publishing houses seldom give multi-book deals to first-time novelists anymore, but generally, the first book contract will contain a right of first refusal clause on the author’s next book. This means that even if your first book does not do well, the publisher reserves the right to see it before anyone else does, to have the option to buy it without running the risk of a bidding war. Which means, in turn, that if your first book enjoys the market success we all hope it will, you will be under considerable pressure to produce the next, pronto.

 

Use your querying stage wisely, and get started on book #2 as soon as you can.

 

As for me, with a memoir coming out this year, a novel just about to make the rounds of editors, and a small business to run, I don’t have time to stand around chatting. I need to get back to work on my next novel.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

— Anne Mini

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The stigma of stereotyping

Ah, January: the time when agents are running around in circles, scooting to provide necessary tax documentation for their authors’ royalties by the end of the month, writers are feverishly sending out their New Year’s resolution queries and unsolicited manuscripts, and contest judges are steeling themselves for the next batch of entries. Actually, it’s such a busy time of year in the publishing industry that I always tell my editing clients: just stay home for now. Give the queries a rest for a few weeks because, honestly, this is far and away the hardest time of year to get picked up by an agent. With everyone under the sun querying at once, competition is at its most fierce.

 

You can always start querying again next month.

 

The timing is good, too, for PNWA members, because contest entries are due at the end of February. Now’s a fabulous time to be polishing up the work you plan to submit; for those of you new to the blog, check out the posts from the three weeks around the holidays for a ton of advice about how to improve your entries in the eyes of judges. (And lest this sound like a sales pitch for the organization that sponsors my passing all of this advice on to you, consider: winning the 2004 Zola award for my memoir propelled me directly into the path of my wonderful agent, who sold the book to a fine NYC publisher within 8 months of my night of pride at PNWA. I’m just saying.)

 

Even if you don’t, for some reason beyond my ken, want to enter the contest — hey, I know that you all have lives — it’s still a great time to be working on your submissions, rather than submitting them. Which is why today I chose a topic that will help you no matter whether you are entering a contest or querying an agent: avoiding stereotypes in your work.

 

Television and movies have rather hardened us to stereotypes, haven’t they? In visual media, stereotypes are accepted as a means of shorthand, a way to convey intended meaning without adding length to the plot or character development for minor characters. In this shorthand, we are all expected to accept that “regular guys” on screens large and small will invariably be commitment-shy, inarticulate about their emotions, and into meaningless sex; pretty women will be shallow, especially if they’re busty; anyone whose name ends in a vowel will be Mafia-connected; every Southerner will be bigoted, and every politician will be corrupt, unless played by the romantic lead.

 

In other words: the moment that Oliver Stone decided to show us Jim Morrison having a metaphysical experience, didn’t we all already know that he was going to stick a Native American somewhere in the frame as a spiritual merit badge?

 

Personally, I find this kind of predictability utterly boring. Honestly, as soon as any man in a horror movie is mentioned as having had “a hard childhood,” don’t we all know by now that he’s going to turn out to be the serial killer? Don’t we all know instantly that if the female lead faints or mentions putting on weight, she must be pregnant? And oh, lordy, as soon as we see Jackie Chan standing next to a ladder, don’t we all instinctively brace for a fight to break out?

 

Don’t get me wrong — I adore Jackie Chan; he’s a wonderful comedy writer. But after seeing dozens of ladder-related incidents in countless movies throughout his career, I suspect that he could garner laughs at this point by walking up to any given ladder, turning to the camera, and inviting the audience to join him in counting until a gang of ruffians appears to beat him up.

 

If I find such predictable elements boring, imagine how their appearance must make the fine people who read thousands and thousands of agency submissions for a living want to tear their own hair out, strand by painful strand. Because, alas, this sort of stereotyping is not limited to screenwriting alone. It has found its way — oh, how abundantly — into novels.

 

The sad thing is, it’s often unconscious on the part of the writer. Most of us imbibe truisms from our television sets, so it seems natural to us that every professor should be absentminded, every redhead should have a fiery temper, every high school cheerleader be a bimbette who cares only for boys with expensive cars. And, for what it’s worth, there are many, many readers out there who won’t lift an eyebrow if you reproduce these stereotypes in your work.

 

However, in ANY querying situation, just as in any contest or in submitting to any small publishing house on the planet, a writer can have literally NO idea who is going to read her submission. What that crucial reader — crucial because that person will make the decision whether your work is worth promoting or not — believes or does not believe about the patterns of human interaction is a big mystery. You cannot assume that this person is going to, say, laugh at the same jokes as everyone at your office.

 

And this can be counterintuitive, because as anyone who follows standup comedy can already tell you, there are a lot of people out there who will laugh at sexist, racist, homophobic, and other humor not particularly insightful about the nuances of the human condition. (Anyone want to hear about the differences between New York and LA? Anyone? Anyone?)

 

Many years ago, when e-mail was just starting to become widely used, an old high school classmate of mine looked me up. For awhile, we exchanged messages (okay, I’ll admit it, while we were both at work; it’s how Americans have gotten their revenge for losing coffee breaks and paid overtime) about what was going on in our daily lives, but like many people, Mark’s idea of keeping in touch with far-flung friends was to forward jokes that he’d found on the internet. Jokes he would not necessarily tell face-to-face.

 

Some of those jokes were awfully darned offensive, but my gentle twitting in response did not make him stop sending them. My bouncing them back to him did not work, either. So, on a day when he had sent me three jokes that were sexist (and two of them racist as well), I sent him a reply wherein I detailed exactly WHY the jokes were not funny to me; because I am a funny person, I rewrote one of them so it was funny without being offensive, to show him the difference. I thought he’d get a kick out of it, and he would stop forwarding such jokes to me.

 

You can see this coming, right?

 

When I went to work the next day, my inbox was crammed to the gills with nasty responses from people I had never heard of, much less intended to e-mail. (Seems I had accidentally chosen REPLY ALL.) About the nicest thing any of them called me was a snob; many suggested that my hobby was doing unpleasant things to men for which dominatrixes are very well paid indeed, and most seemed to think I was of the canine persuasion. In short, it was a bloodbath.

 

It took me several hours to figure out what had happened: apparently, Mark had been routinely forwarding these same jokes to everyone in his office. How did I figure it out? Two clues: a sharp rebuke from Mark, beginning with, “Are you trying to get me fired?” and five e-mails from female coworkers of his, thanking me for asking him publicly to stop. According to them, since the boss routinely forwarded (and told) this type of joke himself, they were all afraid that they would get fired if they said anything about it. I suspect they were right — the boss sent me one of the nastiest of the flame-mails.

 

Now, the content of the jokes is actually not my point here: other people might well have read them without finding them offensive; it’s entirely possible that I was simply the wrong audience for them. The important thing to note is that both Mark and I made, in one sense, the same mistake: we each sent something out assuming that the recipients thought the same way we did. And that is always a mistake.

 

In this case, our respective assumptions merely ended a friendship — which, given that we’d known each other since junior high and this incident occurred when I was in graduate school, was not an insignificant loss. But consider this: was what either of us did really so unlike what writers who include stereotyping in their work do every day when they submit to agents and editors?

 

Trust me, because I have learned this from long experience: when you send in a submission, you have even less idea about the interpersonal politics and personalities at any given agency or publishing house than I did all those years ago about the corporate culture of Mark’s company. You may not intend to hurt anyone’s feelings or raise anyone’s hackles, but honestly, you have no way of knowing that the agent’s assistant WASN’T a cheerleader in high school —and class valedictorian to boot. Maybe your use of an ostensibly harmless bimbo character will be one use too many for her — because maybe, just maybe, that reader is the kind of really nice person who worked at Mark’s company, who has been shrugging off offense after offense for years, because that’s how you get along at a job.

 

You never can tell. But just once, it would be nice to see a Native American character actually WALK into or out of a room, rather than appearing mysteriously and/or melting away into the darkness, wouldn’t it?

 

I’m not saying that you should strip your sociopolitical views from what you write. Definitely not. But do be aware that, like the law professor I mentioned a couple of weeks ago who struck up a conversation with an unknown colleague without realizing that the unknown’s wife was a Supreme Court justice, your reputation can only be improved by utilizing every ounce of tact at your disposal. Every time you use a stereotype, even one you’ve seen a million times on TV, you run the risk of offending someone’s sensibilities on the receiving end.

 

That’s just a fact.

 

Besides, you’re more talented than that. I know you’re more than capable of making your characters your own, without taking the easy way out of invoking stereotypes as a substitute for character development.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

– Anne Mini

 

P.S.: Oh, and so you know, the PNWA website will be on hold for a few days later this week, so it may reemerge in its new and fabulous form!

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It’s all in the timing

Have you finished sending out your fall’s quota of query letters to agents yet? Or, if you are dealing directly with editors, have they already received your manuscripts? Well done, if so: I release you to pursue a well-deserved long winter’s nap. I’ll wake you up around Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

 

If you have not, and if you are the kind of impatient person who gets upset if her letters are not answered within a month or two, I would seriously advise delaying your next set of queries until well after everyone’s New Year’s resolutions have had time to peter out — the experts say that takes about three weeks, on average.

 

As regular readers of this blog already know, you’re far better off using the intervening time to polish your submissions into perfection than sending out fresh queries. From now through the end of the year, the publishing world is a dead zone; for the first month of the year, it is a madhouse. Either way, it means delays and frustration for writers caught in the maelstrom.

 

For those new to the sad reality, almost no new business is conducted between Thanksgiving and Christmas in the NYC publishing industry. Agencies recognize this, and roll back their efforts accordingly. Some ambitious souls do launch back in with a will between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, although it is rare, because everyone is cringing with anticipation over the annual descent of the twin horrors of January: both publishing houses and agencies need to get all of their tax data out to authors by the end of the month, which invariably causes a flurry of paperwork, and almost every unpublished author in North America sends at least one query letter in the first month of the year.

 

Including all of those timid souls who were too intimidated by the process even to consider sending out queries back in June. Think about it: if you have spent the last eight or ten months working up nerve to show your work to others, what’s your single most likely New Year’s resolution?

 

The result, as any agent or editor will tell you with rays of horror shooting from her eyes, is a perfect avalanche of queries and unsolicited manuscripts. Tends to make the readers a might testy – and testy is the last thing you want the person screening your precious submission to be, right?

 

If you were not aware of this two-month hiatus, it’s not your fault: it is just one of those rules of the game that someone has to tell you. I have met writers with YEARS of submissions under their belts who continued, mystified, to rush to their mailboxes throughout each Yuletide season, only to be disappointed to find nothing more than holiday cards from long-lost friends, presents from close kith and kin, and perhaps a few candy canes left by the postman. That most coveted of presents, a contract from an agent or a publisher, is almost never found under the Christmas tree.

 

So don’t bother asking your local department store Santa for it. I’ve tried, and it doesn’t work.

 

Fortunately, you have come to the right place to avoid your work getting lost in the crowd. In the first place, NEVER send an unsolicited manuscript — even if you read in a fairly credible guide that the publishing house or agency will consider them. Yes, you should always send exactly what the agent or editor has asked to see, but trust me, you are ALWAYS better off asking first, rather than going to the considerable expense and trouble of sending an entire manuscript. Unsolicited manuscripts almost always end up in one of three places: in the garbage can/recycling bin, in the author’s mailbox, accompanied by a form letter stating that it does not meet our needs at this time, or, in the best-case scenario, sitting in a dank storeroom with hundreds of other unsolicited manuscripts, waiting for the company’s annual let’s-go-through-the-slush-pile party or the Second Coming, whichever comes first.

 

Second, and even more important for your sanity, don’t bother querying during the dead time. It’s far, far better to be one of three hundred query letters in a week than one of three thousand.

 

I found out only this last week what publishing houses and agencies are DOING during the December dead time. I had always thought that they just whooped it up during the holidays, but no: it is a sort of winter cleaning, when everyone catches up on the work that has fallen through the cracks in the previous eleven months. Think of it as the chrysalis stage of the publishing process, when all the little editors are wrapped up tight in their cocoons, waiting for spring.

 

Did you find that image soothing? Did it reconcile you to the long wait to come?

 

I didn’t think so. But once again, here is a situation where knowing a bit about how the publishing industry works can save you minutes, hours, or even weeks of soul-wrenching doubt about whether the quality of your work is the reason you have not heard back yet.

 

Let me save you some chagrin: the quality of the work, good or bad, is almost NEVER the reason for a delayed response; internal pressures at the agency or publishing house almost always are to blame. (For a more complete explanation of how these factors work, see my postings from early September.) It’s tempting to attribute a long turn-around time to the agent’s showing your query or your manuscript around to a delighted staff, in order to get everyone on board, or to an editor’s wanting to read your submission for the third time, in order to convince himself that it really is as brilliant as he had thought the first time through. For the more masochistically-minded, it is tempting to conclude that the work is terrible, and so has been set aside, pending future guffaws.

 

But the simple fact is, this is an industry where people are EAGER to clear paper off their desks: if you have not heard back on a submission, far and away the most probable explanation is that no one has read it yet. And if you sent it between Thanksgiving and MLK, Jr., Day, that probability soars to a near certainty. Is it really worth torturing yourself with that kind of delay?

 

Instead, why not treat your work to a stimulating rewrite during the holiday season? Better still, why not read it from front to back in hard copy, so you can catch any lingering errors? Then – rested, refreshed, and perfected by its holiday spa treatment – you can send it out into the world in the new year, confident that your work is at its best and brightest.

 

Just an early holiday notion, my friends, designed to keep that seasonal sparkle alight in your eye. Keep up the good work!

 

— Anne Mini

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Surfing in the sea of reviews

Hello, all —

 

In previous postings, I talked about how to track down who represents whom, so that you may address queries to the agents who represent authors whose work you like, or (even better) whose work resembles yours in some important respect. Today, I am going to talk about how to expand your querying list by reading book reviews, an inexpensive and highly effective way to identify agents with a solid recent track record of selling books in your area.

 

“Wait!” I hear those of you who have been paying attention to my recent postings cry. “Wouldn’t any list of books just coming out now be a reflection of what agents were selling at least a year ago, rather than now? Aren’t you always yammering about how agents live in the now, and how we should strive to be as up-to-the-minute in our research as possible?”

 

Why, yes, intelligent readers: you get a gold star for the day. However, keeping up-to-the-minute on who is selling what NOW pretty much requires subscribing to one of the rather expensive publishing databases, such as Publishers Marketplace, or an industry paper, such as Publishers Weekly. As a dispenser of free advice myself (free in both directions: writing these blogs is my volunteer contribution to the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, a fine organization devoted to helping all of us), I am very much in favor of highlighting any free resources that are available to writers. Most aspiring writers are already struggling to find time to write, and there is a whole industry devoted to producing seminars, conferences, books, and magazines devoted to helping all of them become better and more publishable writers. So if I can save you a few shekels, I like to do it.

 

And the book review method is undoubtedly cheap: if you go to a public library, you don’t even have to buy the newspaper to read book reviews. While print media book reviews almost never list the agent of a book in question (as opposed to industry advance reviews — see several posts ago — which occasionally do), reading the reviews will enable you to single out writers who are either writing for the same micro-niche you are (and the more specific you can be about that, the better, in terms of soliciting an agent) or whose style is similar to yours. Then, once you have identified the writers whose representation you covet, you can use the methods I have already discussed to track down their agents.

 

The book review will also tell you, by implication, how good the agent is at placing work with publishers who promote their authors’ books well. As you have undoubtedly noticed, the vast majority of books published in North America are not reviewed in the popular press; it is no longer sufficient simply to send a bound galley with a polite cover letter to a publication to get it reviewed. If you see a review in a major publication, it is because it is expected to be a big seller, is by an author already well recognized, or someone (usually the publicity department at the publishing house, but with increasing frequency, the author) has been a shameless nagger. Since even a poor review in a major publication will equal more book sales, it is very much in your interest to find an agent who is good at bullying publishers into nagging reviewers on behalf of her authors’ books.

 

Obviously, finding well-reviewed first-time authors in your genre should be your first goal in review-scanning, as their agents will probably be most open to your work. Once you start reading the major book reviewers, however, you will probably notice that first-time authors receive only a very small share of their notice. Personally, I would find it a bit tedious to keep on informing the world yet again that Alice Walker is talented and that J.K. Rowling has a future in children’s literature, when I could be telling the world about an exciting new author, but as I have mentioned before, I do not make the rules; I merely tell you about them.

 

If you have read a publication several times without finding a single author whose work sounds similar to yours, move on to another publication. And if you find it difficult to tell from the reviews whose work is like yours, take the review section of the paper to a well-stocked bookstore and start pulling books off the shelves. I’m sure that you are a good enough reader to tell in a paragraph or two if the agent who fell in love with any given book is at all likely to admire your prose stylings.

 

Often, though, this is not necessary, as many book reviewers rush to compare new authors to established ones, often within the first few lines: just today, I was reading a review of Stephanie Kallos’ John Irvingesque plotting. A statement like this can make it unnecessary to read the rest of the review. If your work resembles Irving’s, but you despair of hooking his agent, you would be well advised to try Kallos’. Get it?

 

If all of this seems like a lot of work, bear in mind the alternative: not targeting agents specifically, or, heaven help us, adopting a mass strategy where you blanket the agenting world with generic requests. Allow me to reiterate: just as trial attorneys learn not to ask questions whose answers they cannot anticipate, I, and literally every agented writer I know, have learned not to query agents who are not DEMONSTRABLY interested in our kind of writing. Sending only targeted queries can substantially reduce your rejection rate.

 

Especially if you have been going the mass mailing route — most agents simply ignore “Dear Agent” letters, but they genuinely do pay attention to queries that pay them the compliment of noticing that they have sold books in the past. As I have mentioned before (see my late August and early September postings), it is VASTLY to your advantage to be able to open your query letter with a clear, book-specific reference to why you have selected that particular agent: “Since you so ably represented David Guterson’s SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS, I believe that you will enjoy my book…”

 

Trust me on this one.

 

In postings to come, I shall be turning my attention from agent-finding to other aspects of the publishing process. This does not mean I am leaving the subject forever, though: if you have questions you would like answered, or agent stories you would like to share, feel free to chime in via the COMMENTS function, below. Heck, if you’re having an unusual amount of trouble finding out who represented a particular book, let me know, and I’ll see if I can help you out. (Within reason, of course; please don’t just send me your entire list.)

 

Keep up the good work!

 

– Anne Mini

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Does size matter?

Dearly beloved:

 

Today, I am resuming my series of posts on agencies with a discussion on the merits of big ones vs. small ones. 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.

 

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

 

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

 

Remember the question I asked a few posts ago: what do you want from your agent? Consider very, very carefully how important personal contact is to you, because if this relationship works out, you will be living with your decision for a very long time. Will you go nuts if a month goes by silently while an editor has your manuscript? Would you be happy with the occasional e-mail to answer your questions or keep you updated, or would you prefer telephone calls. Do you want to hear the feedback of editors who have rejected your work, so you can revise accordingly, or would you rather get through as many submissions as quickly as possible? 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, which can seem a bit counter-intuitive. Big agencies have greater resources for support staff, whereas in a small agency (or with a stand-alone agent) the agents may be doing support work as well; it would make sense if the small agency agents were busier. However, nowhere is the old adage “tasks expand in direct proportion to the time available to perform them” more evident than in the publishing industry: as an agent becomes more important, he takes on more clients. Big equals powerful here.

 

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. A few “boutique agencies” that deliberately keep themselves small in order to occupy a very specific niche, but it is rare. There’s no missing 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. Before you commit to a big agency or a major agent, 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.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My agency is influential enough to present its clients’ proposals in GRAY folders.

 

Yes, yes, I am very lucky, and people in the industry recognize that. When I was deciding between agents, I attended a small writers’ conference in Montana, one of those gloriously intimate ones where perhaps only one agent attends, but you can talk with her for an hour. Since I already had several irons on the fire, I did not approach the agent du jour, except to introduce a writer who I thought would interest her (I’m notorious for doing this; writers are often too shy to introduce themselves). By the end of the conference, the agent had heard that I’d won the PNWA award, and her curiosity piqued, she sought me out to see if I had signed with anyone yet. A couple of minutes into her pitch, I mentioned who I was deciding between, and the agent instantly deflated. “Oh,” she said. “We’re talking THAT league.”

 

As I said, I have been very lucky: winning the PNWA contest got me a hearing with many agents in THAT league. (In the unlikely event that I am being too subtle here: ENTER THE CONTEST!) I have also been lucky in that while I enjoy the benefits of a large agency, my agent has the time to answer my questions and talk with me about my future and current writing: whether our quite-frequent contact is primarily the result of our respectively scintillating personalities or the roller-coaster ride my memoir has been taking on the way to publication, I leave you to speculate. I suspect that I am taking up disproportionate amounts of her time, amongst her many clients, and am writing furiously on my next book to make it worth her while.

 

Which brings me back to a point I made a few postings ago: it honestly is a good idea to try to get some sense of who your agent is, beyond the cold statistics of her clients’ sales, before you sign. You don’t have to attend very many conferences before you meet your first hungry new agent, willing to promise the moon, nor to meet your first 100-client bigwig. There are a lot of alternatives in between, but the only way you are going to find your best fit is to give some hard thought to what you want and ask good questions until you figure out if the agent who wants you is in fact the best choice for you and your work.

 

In my next post, I shall talk about how to decide which agents to approach, beyond simply opening up a standard agent guide at random, sticking a pin in a page, and querying the agency with a hole in its description. Like most parts of the long endurance test that leads to publication, there are a few shortcuts I think you should know.

 

In the meantime, have a lovely weekend, and as always, keep up the good work!

 

– Anne Mini

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What’s in a name?

Hello, dear readers —

 

I’ve been holding a client’s hand (she says hello, by the way) for the last two days while she struggles to come to terms with her publisher’s throwing out her (quite good) title for her novel. Yes, I know that the subject of the week is agents, but her plight reminded me to pass along something I have been meaning to tell you about the post-contract world: contrary to popular belief and writerly preference, authors seldom get to name their own works; we’re seldom even invited to the baby’s christening, metaphorically speaking. And for the author, the shock of seeing her own work branded with a new title can be very keen.

 

Since some of you are, I hope, going to be picked up by agents and sell your books to editors this fall, I think the time is now ripe to speak of titles, and the author’s relationship to them in the current publishing environment. Simply speaking, they’re like the names given to a newborn kitten: the tyke may have been a perfect Cuddles in her infancy, but as an adult, she is probably going to transmogrify at some point into a Chelsea.

 

As we all know, titles are crucially important to the success of a book. A good title intrigues potential readers: it has good meter, isn’t a cliché (and don’t we all wish the people who title movies understood THAT?), and feels good in the mouth. It is memorable, catchy, and ideally, has something to do with the content and/or tone of the book. Knowing this, if you are like most authors, you have probably spent months or even years agonizing over whether the title you have selected for your baby is the right one.

 

Please do not be too disappointed if the title you picked is not be the one that ends up on the published book cover. The author’s choice seldom is.

 

This is not, I’m told, a reflection upon writers’ ability to tell readers succinctly what their books are about so much as a practical demonstration that marketers control many ostensibly creative decisions. Even great titles hit the dust all the time, because they are too similar to other books currently on the market or don’t contain catchphrases that will resonate with the target market or even just don’t please the people who happen to be sitting in the room when the titling decision is made.

 

In fact, editorial rumor has it that many marketing departments will automatically reject any title offered by the author, on general principle, no matter how good or how apt it may be, in order to put the publishing house’s stamp upon the book. I don’t know how true this rumor is, but I can tell you for an absolute certainty that if your publisher retitles your book, literally everyone at the publishing house will think you are unreasonable to mind at all.

 

I’ve seen it happen too many times.

 

My memoir was originally titled IS THAT YOU, PUMPKIN?, but I certainly did not expect it to stick. As a freelance editor and friend of literally hundreds of aspiring writers, I have held a lot of weeping authors’ hands in the aftermath of their titles being ruthlessly changed from above. I was expecting my title to be changed, and frankly, I was not expecting to be consulted about it. I am, after all, not a person with a marketing degree, but a writer and editor. I know a good title when I see one, but I cannot legitimately claim to know why one book will make its way up to the cash register while the one next to it won’t. I was prepared, then, to be humble and bow to the inevitable. I was prepared to be spectacularly reasonable.

 

This compliant attitude, I am sorry to report, was not adequate to deal with the situation. I could have been as chipper as Shirley Temple in tap-dancing shoes and as willing to change my habits as a first-time dieter, and it still would not have been enough.

 

As it happens, outside forces intervened, sealing my fate. Philip’s work is, as you may already be aware, currently popular with moviemakers: one of the selling points of my memoir was that two movies based upon his works were scheduled to come out within the next year and a half: A SCANNER DARKLY in the fall of 2005 and THE GOLDEN MAN in the summer of 2006. Only, movie schedules being what they are and animation being time-consuming, A SCANNER DARKLY’s release date got pushed back to March, 2006. And THE GOLDEN MAN (retitled NEXT) was pushed back to 2007

 

This could not have been better news to the folks sitting in marketing meetings, talking about my book. IS THAT YOU, PUMPKIN? was already scheduled to be published in the winter of 2006. In the blink of an eye, my nebulous publication date gelled into almost instantaneous firmness, and the marketing department decided within the course of a single meeting to change the title of my book to A FAMILY DARKLY, presumably to make it reminiscent of SCANNER.

 

“Interesting,” I said cautiously when my editor first told me that my baby had been rechristened while I was looking the other way. “Um, do you mind if I ask what A FAMILY DARKLY means?”

 

Thereupon followed much scintillating discussion — and no, I still haven’t found out what it means, or why it was deemed necessary to throw the rules of grammar to the winds. Suffice it to say that both sides set forth their arguments; mine were deemed too “academic” (meaning that I hold an earned doctorate from a major research university, which apparently renders my opinion on what motivates book buyers, if not actually valueless, at any rate very amusing indeed to marketing types), and the title remained changed.

 

“Why,” I hear my generous and empathetic readers asking, “did they bother to discuss it with you at all, if they had already made up their minds?”

 

An excellent question, and one that richly deserves an answer; half the published writers I know have wailed this very question skyward repeatedly after their titles were summarily changed by their publishers. I believe that the answer lies in the field of psychology. Because, you see, when a brand-new title is imposed upon a book, the publishers don’t just want the author to go along with it: they want the author to LIKE it. And if the title goes through several permutations, they want the author to be more enthusiastic about the final change than about the first one.

 

Get out those tap-dancing shoes, Shirley.

 

Furthermore, your enthusiasm is, if you please, to be instantaneous, despite the fact that if the marketing department (who, in all probability, will not have read your book by the time the title decision is made) is mistaken about the market value of the new title, the author is invariably blamed. (Think about it: haven’t you always held your favorite writers responsible if their new books have silly monikers?) Oh, and unless your contract states specifically that you have veto power over the title, you’re going to lose the fight hands down, even if you don’t suffer the handicap of postgraduate degrees.

 

This is not the kind of frustration you can complain about to your writing friends, either. You will see it in their eyes, even if they are too polite to say it out loud: you have a publishing contract, and you’re COMPLAINING?

 

Thus, the hapless author gets it from both sides: you’re an uncooperative, unrealistic, market-ignorant mule to your publishers, and you’re a self-centered, quibbling deal-blower to your friends. All anyone can agree about is that you are ungrateful beyond human example.

 

I wish I could report that I had found a clever way to navigate past this Scylla and Charybdis, but I have not, nor has any author I know. The best you can hope to be, when your time comes, is polite and professional. And a damned good tap-dancer.

 

I guess, in the end, all the writer can do is accept that some things, like the weather and the titles of her own books, are simply beyond her control, now and forever, amen. For my next book, I’m going to give it my SECOND-best title, and reserve my first for the inevitable discussion with the marketing folks.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

– Anne Mini

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So they’ve asked you to send chapters – and a request for your help

Once you have sent off a great query letter, or made a fabulous pitch at a conference, you hit the jackpot: an agent asks to see your work. And you’ve got it made, right?

 

Well, not necessarily, if your writing is not in apple-pie order. (And no, I don’t know where I picked up that particular homey phrase. Probably in my wayward youth, from someone like Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March or Carol Ryrie Brink’s Caddie Woodlawn. It has a 19th-century ring to it.) Just as your marketing materials should be so impeccably put together that they can travel by themselves with no excuses, even in the most literate circles, just as your title page has to be a paragon of professionalism, your initial chapters need to be in well-nigh perfect shape before you send them out.

 

I tremble to report this, but it is very, very common for writers to send off the first chapter or three of their novels WITHOUT EVER HAVING ANYONE ELSE READ THEM. Thus, for many writers, the agent’s feedback, which is often quite minimal, is the first time many writers EVER get an outside opinion of their work.

 

Or at least without having been read by anyone at all likely to be able to give an objective opinion; as I have discussed before, the feedback of your best friend, your mother, your siblings, and/or your lover (s), however charming it may be, is unlikely to yield the kind of concrete, tangible feedback every writer needs. No offense to your kith and kin, but it’s true. Even if your mother runs a major publishing house for a living, your brother is a high-flying agent, and your lover reviews major novelists regularly for THE WASHINGTON POST, they are unlikely to have the perspective necessary to give you objective feedback. Nor should they have to. It’s their job to make you feel better about yourself – or to make you feel worse about yourself, depending upon your taste in relationships and familial patterns. Ties of affection do not necessarily good readers make.

 

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

 

At that point, trust me, wailing, “But my husband/wife/second cousin just loved it!” will not help you.

 

I can’t tell you what a high percentage of my clients come to me after years of following the advice of people who, while well-meaning and sharp-eyed, could only identify problems in the text, but had no idea how to fix them. I want to save you, dear readers, as much disappointment as possible. Out comes my broken record again: good writing is a necessary condition for getting published, but not sufficient alone. Good writing needs to be presented professionally, or it tends not to find a home.

 

And emotionally, what are you doing when you send out virgin material to a stranger who can change your life? It’s the equivalent of bypassing everyone you know in getting an opinion on your fancy new hairdo and going straight to the head of a modeling agency. Professionals have no reason to pull their punches; very often, the criticism comes back absolutely unvarnished. Even when rejection is tactful, naturally, with the stakes so high for the author, any negative criticism feels like being whacked on the head with a great big rock.

 

I’m trying to save you some headaches here.

 

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

 

And maybe you are right.

 

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

 

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

 

Dear me, I have gotten so carried away with my topic that I shall have to defer my actual tips until tomorrow’s posting! (For those of you who haven’t been following my saga over the last 6 weeks, I am in the midst of fighting off a lawsuit against my forthcoming memoir AND have a deadline for getting a book to a publisher by the end of next week – by my birthday, as it happens. So my time is a LITTLE tight these days.)

 

For those of you who have been following my saga of triumph and woe, may I presume to ask a favor? This is National Banned Books Week (September 19-23); in celebration, would you consider logging on to one of the Philip K. Dick fan sites (www.philipkdickfans.com would be an admirable choice) and weighing in on the subject of the Dick estate’s continuing attempts to censor my book, A FAMILY DARKLY? It would only take a couple of minutes, and it would help both me and all future writers of memoirs. The issue here is actually very simple: is it or is it not fair to tell an author what she can and can’t write about her own life?

 

Normally, I would not ask, but after all, this is the week to speak up.

 

And if you are writing or know of other books that have been stymied at the point of publication by pernicious lawsuits, please fill me in via the Comments function, below. At the moment, I’m in a pretty good position to pass along links and resources that might be useful to silenced authors.

 

As always, keep up the good work! And happy National Banned Books Week!

 

– Anne Mini

 

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Swimming in the agent sea

When I heard my name announced as the winner of the NF/memoir category at the PNWA conference last year, my first conscious feeling was naturally elation. My second conscious feeling was complete and utter doom. Yes, I know that sounds ungrateful, but it’s true. What had I done to myself? To recap, I had just won a major book award for a book I had not yet written. There was a slight possibility, I felt, that people would now start asking to see the book.

Let me backtrack a little and talk about what it is like sporting a rainbow-hued finalist’s ribbon at a conference. First, everyone stares at your stomach, all day, every day, because that’s where the ribbon tends to waggle. A lot of sweet people will come up and congratulate you, which is very nice indeed; a significant minority will edge away from you, scowling. And the agents and editors will notice you in a crowd. When you stop an agent who is walking down the hall in order to try out your pitch, she will generally act as though she is pleased to meet you. It’s a revolution in manners for all concerned.

(Have I said enough yet to convince you to try your luck in next year’s contest? Read on.)

When you win one of the top three awards in a category, and you are issued a blue, red, or white ribbon to tickle your stomach, all of the attention paid to your abdomen roughly triples. And if you win the first place award (along with the snazzy gold Zola pin), it’s like walking around all day in the glow of a very hot spotlight. Suddenly, agents and editors can recognize you from across the room – and often will come over to talk to you, just as if you were a person.

There is a good reason that they recognize the first-place winners – and since so few of my PNWA friends seem to know about these perqs, I’m going to talk about them here. The primary benefit is the winners’ breakfast at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. on Saturday, the morning after the award ceremony’s late-night partying. Basically, they throw all of the winners into a room with some croissants and all of the agents and editors for an hour or two.

If you happen to be good at giving your pitch while choking on a stray piece of pineapple, this is the venue for you. Otherwise, it’s rather like giving a press conference while being mauled by affectionate lions. The moral: eat before you get there. In fact, eat heartily before the awards ceremony on Friday, because trust me, once you win and for the next two days, every time you try to stave off starvation, some perky soul will appear in front of you and ask to hear all about your book. Pleasant, of course, but hell on the blood sugar.

My memory of the event may be skewed, of course, because I had only slept about two hours the night before – Cindy Willis, the wonderfully talented winner of the novel category, and I had been whisked off to a party with such precipitation after the award ceremony that I had to give my mother the big news on a cell phone while dashing down a hotel hallway. At the party, our significant others were mysteriously kidnapped and held outside our range of vision, and Cindy and I were each asked to give our pitch about 45 times while people kept handing us food and drink that we were never allowed to consume. We were both so stunned that we clung to each other like the Gish sisters in ORPHANS OF THE STORM.

This is what I remember best about the aftermath of winning: sleep deprivation and being asked to repeat my pitch anytime food came within half a foot of my mouth. Fortunately, I’d had friends who had won these awards before, so I just kept repeating like a mantra: “Of course you can see my book proposal. But not exclusively.”

Even through my haze, I could recall what had happened to my friends who had promised exclusives to the first agents who approached them after they’d won contests. It’s not true every year or at every conference, but there is often a certain amount of rivalry amongst the agents about who is going to carry off the major category winners. The rivalry over one friend’s brilliant humorous novel reached such a pitch that one of the agents started crying because she had granted a faster agent the first exclusive. Other winning friends were asked to overnight an entire manuscript to New York, only not to hear back for a month; to rush home, print out a copy of the manuscript, and deliver it to an agent’s hotel room in the dead of night, only to learn weeks later that the agent in question did not even represent that genre, and to promise to refuse to talk to other agents at the conference, lest the writer be blandished away. And these instances were all at PNWA, which is known as one of the more genial conferences nationally.

Being sought-after by a gaggle of agents sounds like an odd situation to fear, I know, but the inter-agent competition does not necessarily work to the benefit of the author – and actually, these competitive foibles underscore a problem most writers have at conferences: judging how sincere an agent or editor’s interest is in your work. How can you tell from a fifteen-minute conversation with a total stranger if this is the right agent for you? What is the difference between liking an agent personally and seeing in her an instinctive connection to your work? Your gut, hopped up on adrenaline (and possibly operating without other sustenance), may not be the best barometer in the moment.

So I just kept repeating my pitch and my mantra, parrot-like, collecting cards from agents and editors and scribbling notes about what each wanted to see on the back. Cindy did the same, once I was able to fill her in on the strange stories of yore. All the while, our significant others lurked in a far corner of the room, waiting to carry us off to grab a couple of hours’ sleep before the 7 a.m. lion-mauling.

The advice of my formerly winning friends turned out to be right on the money: about half of the agents asked for exclusives. Because we had declined, Cindy and I both ended up sending our work to a broad array of agents simultaneously, which truly worked to our advantage. Not every agent asked to represent it, of course – put their initial interest down to competition-induced hysteria – but enough of them did that both of us had the wonderful luxury of choice. And that, in a world where it’s so hard to get an agent that good writers often search for years to hook up with the right agent, is luxury indeed.

So I have good reason to have infinite respect for the writers’ network word-of-mouth wisdom. Let’s all help one another in every way we can.

Your day will come. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

–Anne Mini