Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: identifying your work in terms the entire industry can understand

Book marketing 101: identifying your work in terms the entire industry can understand

Yesterday, I warned you that my approach to pitching is a TEENY bit unorthodox. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, I believe that the definition of pitching successfully is not merely being able to cram an entire 400-page book into three sentences and spit it out coherently.

Instead, I define pitching success as the ability to speak fluently and persuasively about a book in terms that make an agent or editor likely to say, “Gee, I’d like to read that. Please send me the first 50 pages right away.” I define a pitch’s success by its results, not its conformity to a pre-set model to be used in all instances.

I know: radical. But thinking of it this way makes it far, far easier to make it through the pitch preparation process, I find: instead of grumblingly adhering to an evidently arbitrary and difficult standard of presentation, you’re gearing up to have all of the marvelously fulfilling conversations of the rest of your life as a professional writer.

Much nicer to wrap your brain around, isn’t it?

Now that you are prepared for my advice to be a bit offbeat, I am not afraid to shock you with my first unorthodox suggestion: DON’T start the pitch-prepping process by sitting down and trying to summarize your book. Instead, let your first step be figuring out where your book would be placed on the bookshelves of Barnes & Noble, Borders, or a similar chain bookstore.

And no, I don’t mean just in fiction, alphabetically. In a marketing display, what kind of books would be grouped around it? How would it be placed so as to suggest that if the potential buyer liked book X, he would probably be interested in your book as well?

Once you know where the pros would envision your book selling best, you will have both an infinitely easier time pitching AND finding agents to query. Suddenly, those cryptic lists of book types in agents’ guides and opaque conference bio blurbs will spring to life for you.

Unfortunately, writers often do not do their homework in this respect — and believe me, from the pros’ perspective, it shows. The industry defines types of books far more specifically than writers tend to do — and no agent represents every kind of book. The sad fact is, the vast majority of aspiring writers out there have only a vague idea of how their books would be marketed to booksellers.

Yet the FIRST question any editor would ask an agent about a book, or a committee would ask an editor, or a book buyer would ask a publishing house’s marketing department is, “What’s the book category?” The book category is in fact the industry shorthand for where a book should be directed in order to sell, at every level.

Before I launch into how to figure out where your book belongs, let’s take a look at how the average pitcher deals with this primary question, and why the standard response tends not to impress agents and editors very much. In the first place, writers often mishear the question as, “So, what is your book about?” rather than what it is, a straightforward question about marketing. Thus, they all too often give exactly the same response they would give anybody who asked the more general latter question at a cocktail party:

“Well (gusty sigh), it’s a novel…mostly, it’s women’s fiction, but I guess it’s also suspense, with thriller elements. And the writing is definitely literary.”

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but to an agent or editor, this kind of response sounds EXACTLY like that noise that Charlie Brown’s teachers used to make: “Wah wah wah wah waagh…”

To put it bluntly, agents and editors think about books as products, rather than merely as works of art or expressions of the inner workings of the writers’ souls. And as products, agents need to sell books to editors, and editors to editorial committees, and marketing departments to distributors, and distributors to bookstores, and bookstores to readers. And I assure you, a vaguely-defined book is much harder to drag through that process.

So it’s an excellent idea to tell them up front — as in both your pitch and the first few lines of your query letter — what kind of book it is. But in order to make sense to people in the industry, you need to speak their language: pick one of their recognized categories.

In other words, don’t just guess, don’t hyphenate, and don’t make up a category.

How do you know where to start? Take a gander at the back jacket of most hardcover books: you will find, usually in either the upper left corner or just above the barcode, a one- or two-word description. That is the book category.

Now, think about your book. Can you come up with, say, 3-5 titles that are similar to it in subject matter, tone, approach, voice, etc? Once you have your list, go to a bookstore (either physically or online) and see where those books are housed. That is, most likely, where your book would be categorized, too.

You can also go through the generally accepted categories and see what intuitively seems like the best fit. Here is the list for fiction:

Fiction (a.k.a. Mainstream Fiction), Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Futuristic Fiction (that is not SF. The usual example is THE HANDMAID’S TALE.), Adventure Fiction, Sports Fiction, Contemporary Fiction; Women’s Fiction, Contemporary Women’s Fiction, Chick Lit, Lady Lit, Lad Lit; Romance, Category Romance, Contemporary Romance, Historical Romance (designate period), Paranormal Romance, Romantica, Erotica, Inspirational Romance, Multicultural Romance, Time Travel Romance; Science Fiction, SF Action/Adventure, Speculative SF, Futuristic SF, Alternate History, Cyberpunk; Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Comic Fantasy, Epic Fantasy; Horror, Paranormal, Vampire Fiction; Thriller, Spy Thriller, Suspense, Romantic Suspense; Mystery, Police Procedural Mystery, Legal Mystery, Professional Mystery, P.I. Mystery, Psychological Mystery, Forensic Mystery, Historical Mystery, Hardboiled Mystery, Cozy Mystery, Cops & Killers Mystery, Serial Killer Mystery, British Mystery, Noir, Caper; Western; Action/Adventure; Comics; Graphic Novel; Short Stories; Poetry; Young Adult, Picture Book, Children’s, Middle Readers.

Pick one for your novel. Specifically, pick the one that comes CLOSEST to where you envision the book being shelved in a big bookstore. But whatever you do, NEVER tell anyone in the industry that you have a “fiction novel” – this is a very, very common pet peeve amongst agents and editors. By definition, a novel IS fiction, always.

For NF, the accepted categories are: Entertaining, Holidays, House & Home, Parenting & Families, How-To, Self-Help, Pop Psychology, Pop Culture, Cookbook, Narrative Cookbook, Food & Wine, Lifestyle, Medical, Alternative Medicine, Health, Fitness, Sports, Psychology, Professional, Engineering, Technical, Computers, Internet, Automotive, Finance, Investing, Business, Careers, Memoir, Autobiography, Biography, Narrative Nonfiction, Historical Nonfiction, True Crime, Law, Philosophy, Religion, Spirituality, Travel, Travel Memoir, Outdoors & Nature, Essays, Writing, Criticism, Arts, Photography, Coffee Table, Gift, Education, Academic, Textbook, Reference, Current Events, Politics/Government, Women’s Studies, Gay & Lesbian (a.k.a. GLBT).

Yes, I’m running through these quickly, but do not despair: the major genre’s writers’ associations tend to provide precise definitions of each subgenre on their websites, and I have gone over all of the standard categories individually under the BOOK CATEGORIES section at right.

And yes, one does occasionally see other categories listed on book jackets. Naturally, there are new categories popping up all the time, a side effect of the expansive creative impulse of the human mind. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should make one up.

Generally speaking, it’s safer to pick one of the standards rather than to insist upon a category that has only been introduced recently: if it’s too new, the agent or editor to whom you are pitching may not yet be aware of it yet. (It happens.)

Trust me, if you are off just a little, an agent who is intrigued by your work will nudge you in the right direction, rather than writing you off because you picked the wrong sub-category. In fact, it’s not at all uncommon for an agent to sign a writer and then say, “You know, Ghislaine, I think your book would sell better as women’s fiction than mainstream fiction. Let’s market it as that.”

And if Ghislaine is a savvy writer, she won’t immediately snap back, “Why is it women’s fiction rather than mainstream — because the author possesses ovaries?” (Not all that an uncommon an underlying reason for the choice, actually; some of my work has been categorized that way on apparently no other pretext.) Instead, market-ready writer that she is, she will respond, “If you think it’s a better idea, William. But do you mind explaining the logic to me, so I may consider it when I’m writing my next novel?”

THAT, my friends, is language the entire industry understands. This is a business where finesse definitely counts.

When in doubt, pick the more general category. Or at any rate, the more marketable one. It increases your chances of your work sounding to an agent like something that will sell. (And for those of you out there sporting ovaries: women’s fiction is far and away the best-selling fiction category. It’s something of a misnomer, because the vast majority of fiction buyers in North America are women, but hey, I don’t make up the lingua franca; I just speak it.)

If you truly get stuck, here is a sneaky trick: go to a well-stocked bookstore and track down a friendly-looking clerk. Describe your book to her in very general terms, and ask her to direct you to the part of the store where you might find something similar. Then start pulling books off the shelf and examining their back covers for categories.

Hint: don’t be too specific, and don’t mention that you wrote the book you are describing. “My favorite book is a suspenseful romantic comedy about murderous contraltos set in the Middle Ages — would you have anything close to that?” tends to yield better results than, “I’m looking for a book about an opera diva who lives in 9th-century Milan, has scores of amorous misadventures, and strangles her conductor/lover. Where would I find that in your store?” The latter is more likely to yield a puzzled shrug than useful directions.

Repeat in as many bookstores as necessary to start seeing a pattern in where you’re being advised to look. That location is where your book is most likely to be shelved.

Yes, this process can be a pain, but stating your category up front will simply make you come across as more professional, because it’s the way that agents and editors talk about books. Agencies do not impose this requirement in order to torment writers, you know; the category you pick will determine to a very great extent whether any given agent or editor will be even remotely interested in your work.

Because yes, Virginia, there are professionals who will simply not read a query or listen to a pitch unless it is for a book in one of their pre-chosen categories.

Agents and editors LIKE making snap judgments, you see. It saves them time. Sorry.

To put a more positive spin on the phenomenon, think of it this way: if you tell an agent immediately what kind of book you are pitching, the busy little squirrels in her brain can start those wheels spinning toute suite, so she can instantly start thinking of editors to whom to sell your book. And that is precisely what you want them to be doing, right?

If you’re still a bit confused, don’t panic: tomorrow, I shall delve into fine-tuning your selection. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Stating the obvious

Stating the obvious

Before I get to today’s installment of the self-editing saga, here’s some worthwhile browsing for those of you who are planning to enter your work in a literary contest, well, ever: the ever-interesting Missy has posted a judge’s-eye view of poetry entries on her blog, the Incurable Disease of Writing. The judge’s perspective is so very different from the entrants’ that it really must be experienced first-hand to be fully comprehended, but Missy does a great job of giving writers an inside peek.

Her timing couldn’t have been better. Today I shall be dealing with a manuscript problem that is frequently invisible to the writer who produced it (myself included, I’ll readily admit), yet glaringly visible to a professional reader, for precisely the same reason that formatting problems are instantly recognizable to a contest judge: after you’ve see the same phenomenon crop up in 75 of the last 200 manuscripts you’ve read, your eye gets sensitized to it.

I’m talking, of course, about those most cut-able of sentences, statements of the obvious. If you’ll take the trouble to read on, I shall give you an example.

I heard some of you out there chuckle — you caught me in the act: the second sentence of the previous paragraph IS an example of a self-evident proposition. Knowing that I am a writer addicted to giving examples, where else would my faithful readers look for further explanation other than later in the text? To the PREVIOUS paragraph?

Lest that seem like an over-reaction to what in fact was an innocent line of text, allow me to give you a peek into the professional reader’s world: when you’re reading in order to catch mistakes — as every agency screener, agent, editor, and contest judge is forced to do, faced with mountains of submissions — you’re inclined to get a mite testy. Liability of the trade.

In fact, to maintain the level of focus necessary edit a manuscript really well, it is often desirable to keep oneself in a constant state of reactivity. To a professional reader in such a state, the appearance of a self-evident proposition on a page is like the proverbial red flag to a bull; the reaction is often disproportionate to the offense. Some things professional readers have been known to howl at the pages in front of them, regardless of the eardrums belonging to the inhabitants of adjacent cubicles:

In response to the innocuous line, “He shrugged his shoulders”: “What else could he possibly have shrugged? His kneecaps?” (Insert violent scratching sounds here, leaving only the words, “He shrugged” still standing in the text.)

In response to the innocent statement, “She blinked her eyes”: “The last time I checked, eyes are the only part of the body that CAN blink!” (Scratch, scratch, scratch.)

In response to “The queen waved her hand at the crowd”: “Waving ASSUMES hand movement! Why is God punishing me like this?” (Scratch, maul, stab pen through paper repeatedly.)

And that’s just how the poor souls react to all of those logically self-evident statements on a sentence level. It’s the assertions of the obvious on a larger scale that send them screaming into their therapists’ offices, moaning that all of the writers of the world have leagued together in a conspiracy to bore them to death.

As is so often the case, the world of film provides some gorgeous examples of the larger-scale writing problem. Take, for instance, the phenomenon film critic Roger Ebert has dubbed the Seeing-Eye Man: after the crisis in an action film has ended, the male lead embraces the female lead and says, “It’s over,” as though the female might not have noticed something as minor as Godzilla’s disappearance or the cessation of gunfire or the bad guys dead at their feet. In response to this helpful statement, she nods gratefully.

Or the cringing actor who glances at the sky immediately after the best rendition of a thunderclap ever heard on film: “Is there a storm coming?”

Taken one at a time, such statements of the obvious are not necessarily teeth-grinding events — but if they happen too often over the course of the introductory pages, they can be deal-breakers. You’re better off cutting ALL of them — and yes, it’s worth a read-through to search out every last one.

Yes, even if your manuscript does not fall into this trap very often. Remember, you have absolutely no control over whose submission a screener will read immediately prior to yours. Even if your submission contains only one self-evident proposition over the course of the first 50 pages, if it appears on page 2, and everybody’s favorite agency screener, Millicent, just finished wrestling with a manuscript where the obvious is pointed out four times a page, how likely do you think it is that Millie will kindly overlook it amongst the multifarious wonders of your pages?

You’re already picturing her astonishing passersby with her wrathful comments, aren’t you?

The trouble is, virtually all the time, these obvious statements appear to the writer to be simple explanation. Innocuous, or even necessary. But provide too much information about a common experience or everyday object, and the line between the practical conveyance of data and explaining the self-evident can become dangerously thin.

I’ve been using bald examples so far, but let’s take a look at how subtle self-evidence might appear on a page:

***The hand of the round clock on the wall clicked loudly with each passing second. Jake ate his pie with a folk, alternating bites of overly-sweetened Ollieberry with swigs of coffee from his mug. As he ate, farmers came into the diner to eat lunch, exhausted from riding the plows that tore up the earth in neat rows for the reception of eventual seedlings. The waitress gave bills to each of them when they had finished eating, but still, Jake’s wait went on and on.***

Now, to an ordinary reader, rather than a detail-oriented professional one, there isn’t much wrong with this paragraph, is there? It conveys a rather nice sense of place and mood. But see how much of it could actually be cut by removing embroideries upon the obvious:

***The round clock on the wall clicked loudly with each passing second. Jake alternated bites of overly-sweetened Ollieberry pie with swigs of coffee. As he ate, farmers came into the diner, exhausted from tearing the earth into neat rows for the reception of eventual seedlings. Even after they had finished eating and left, Jake’s wait went on and on.***

The reduction of an 85-word paragraph to an equally effective 59-word one may not seem like a major achievement, but in a manuscript that’s running long, every cut counts. And the shorter version will make the Millicents of the world, if not happy, at least pleased to see a submission that assumes that she is intelligent enough to know that generally speaking, people eat pie with cutlery and drink fluids from receptacles.

This is one of those areas where it honestly is far easier for a reader other than the writer to catch the problem, though, so if you can line up other eyes to scan your submission before it ends up on our friend Millicent’s desk, do. Hand your first reader the biggest, thickest marking pen in your drawer, and ask her to make a great big X in the margin every time the narrative takes the time to explain that rain is wet, of all things, that a character’s watch was strapped to his wrist, of all places, or that another character applied lipstick to — wait for it — her lips.

I am now going to post this blog on my website on my computer, which is sitting on my desk. To do so, I might conceivably press buttons on my keyboard or even use my mouse for scrolling. You never can tell.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 3 Comments on Repetition — and repetition. And did I mention repetition?

Repetition — and repetition. And did I mention repetition?

Can you stand another few posts on self-editing? I hope so, because after a very refreshing day off yesterday (translation: I edited, and then I had a nice, long, my-fiancé-wondered-if-I’d-been-eaten-by-wolves length writing session. Woo hoo!), I’m raring to go.

Oh, no: I’ve inadvertently used the evil phrase, the one involved in my first A CLOCKWORK ORANGE-like aversion therapy for repetitive phrase use. I was six years old, standing in line for the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland, back in the days when the quality and popularity of the ride was easily discernable by the level of ticket required to board it. E was the best; I believe this particular ride was somewhere in the B range.

So there I was, all eyes and braids, holding my mother’s hand while my father watched my older brother go on D and E ticket rides, waiting in a queue of inexplicable length to cruise around an ersatz London with Peter, Wendy, and the gang. As each ship-shaped (literally) car took a new crew of tourists into the ride itself, Peter’s voice cried out, “Come on, everybody, raring to go-o-o-o!”

After about five minutes of listening to that annoying voice while inching toward the front of line, I started counting the repetitions. By the time it was our turn to step into the flying ship, Peter had barked that inane phrase at me 103 times. It’s all I remember about the ride.

And that, my friends, is how one grows up to be an editor.

Actually, it’s probably fortunate that I was aurally assaulted by a cartoon character chez Mouse in my early youth — it’s helped make me very, very aware of just how much repetition is constantly flung at all of us, all the time. Not just in everyday conversations, as I mentioned last week — although it’s there, too: if you doubt this, go find a community that’s experiencing a heat wave, sit in a popular café, and count the variations on, “Hot enough for ya?”  you hear within a 15-minute period — but in TV and movies as well.

Most of us become inured through years of, well, repetition to the film habit of repeating facts and lines that the screenwriter wants to make sure the viewer remembers, information integral to either the plot (“Remember, Gladys — cut the RED cord hanging from that bomb, not the yellow one!”), character development (“Just because you’re a particle physicist, George, doesn’t mean you’re always right!”), or both (“You may be the best antiques appraiser in the British Isles, Mr. Lovejoy, but you are a cad!”)

The great recent example of this, of course, is the cult TV series Strangers With Candy, a parody of those 1970s Afterschool Special that let young folks like me into esoteric truths like Divorce is Hard on Everyone in the Family, Outsiders are Teased, and Drugs are Bad. (See, I even remembered the morals, doubtless due to repetition.) In SWC, the heroine, Jerri Blank, often telegraphs upcoming plot twists by saying things like, “I would just like to reiterate, Shelly, that I would just die if anything happened to you.” Moments later, of course, Shelly is toast.

It’s funny in the series, but it’s less funny to encounter in a manuscript, particularly if your eyes are attuned to catching repetition, as many professional readers’ are. Characters honestly do say things like, “But Emily, have you forgotten that I learned how to tie sailors’ knots when I was kidnapped by pirates three years ago?”

All the time. Even when the first 200 pages of the manuscript dealt with that very pirate kidnapping.

At base, this is another trust issue, isn’t it? The writer worries that the reader will not remember a salient fact crucial to the scene at hand, just as the screenwriter worries that the audience member might have gone off to the concession stand at the precise moment when the murderer first revealed that he had a lousy childhood.

Who could have predicted THAT?

Television and movies have most assuredly affected the way writers tell stories. One of the surest signs that a catch phrase or particular type of plot twist has passed into the cultural lexicon is the frequency with which it turns up in manuscript submissions. And one of the best ways to assure a submission’s rejection is for it to read just like half the submissions that came through the door that day.

Come closer, and I’ll tell you a secret: repetition is boring. REALLY boring. And here’s another secret: people who read manuscripts for a living are more likely to notice repetition than other readers, not less. (Perhaps Peter Pan traumatized them in their younger days, too.) Not only repetition within your manuscript, but repetition ACROSS manuscripts as well.

We all know how agents and editors feel about manuscripts that bore them, right? In a word: next!

It may not be a problem to which your manuscript falls prey — and if so, hurrah for you; it’s hard to strip a manuscript of them entirely, because they are so pervasive. But just to be on the safe side, here’s a project for a rainy day: sit down with your first 50 pages and highlight every line of dialogue in there that you’ve ever heard a TV or movie character say verbatim. Ever.

Was that giant slurping noise I just heard the sound of the blood rushing out of everyone’s faces at the realization of just how much dialogue that might potentially cover?

No? What if I also ask you to highlight similar phrases in the narration? First-person narration is notorious for echoing the currently popular TV shows.

Often, it’s unconscious on the writer’s part: it’s brainwashing from all of that repetition. It would be surprising if common dialogue HADN’T made its way into all of our psyches, actually: according to CASSELL’S MOVIE QUOTATIONS, the line, “Let’s get outta here!” is heard in 81% of films released in the US between 1938 and 1985.

Care to take a wild guess at just how often some permutation of that line turns up in submissions to agencies? No? Well, care to take a wild guess at how many agents and editors notice a particular phrase the second time it turns up in a text? Or the second time it’s turned up in a submission this week?

“Come on, everybody, raring to go-o-o-o!”

Unfortunately, just because a writer doesn’t realize that he’s doing lifting lines doesn’t mean that an agency screener won’t notice and be annoyed by it. Particularly if three of the manuscripts she’s seen today have used the same line.

It happens. Or, to put it in Afterschool Special terms, Checking for Both Types of Repetition is Good.

I know, I know, it’s tempting to assume that you haven’t used any of the standard catchphrases or plot twists, but believe me, even the most innovative writers do it from time to time. And for good reason: the rest of the population is subjected to the same repetitive teleplays and screenplays as writers are.

Over time, people do tend to start to speak the way they would if they were playing themselves onscreen. (A writer of very good hardboiled mysteries told me that he is constantly meeting private detectives who sound like Sam Spade, for instance.) But remember, just because people do or say something in real life doesn’t mean it will necessarily be interesting translated to the printed page.

Check. Weed out both repetition within your manuscript AND material unconsciously borrowed from TV and movies. Or, better yet, have a good reader you trust check for you. (And if you’re not sure whether a particular twist or line is common enough to count, film critic Roger Ebert maintains a database of them.)

Often, it’s surprising how small a textual change will turn an incipient cliché into a genuinely original moment. But a writer cannot perform that magic trick without first identifying where it should be applied.

It’s time for me to go-o-o (curse you, Pan!) for today. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Vary your word choices!

Vary your word choices!

That ripple of titters you hear out there in the cosmos, dear readers, is the sound of every soul for whom I have ever critiqued a manuscript guffawing: the title of today’s post is something that I have been scrawling in the margins of manuscripts authored by writers living and dead since I first started proofing galleys in my early adolescence. Today’s piece of self-editing advice comes deep from the lair of my most fire-breathing editorial pet peeve: repetition.

It is not an uncommon source of annoyance amongst professional readers; as any good line editor can tell you, a tendency to become a trifle miffed in the face of writing that could be better is, while perhaps a handicap in polite society, a positive boon in his line of work. I was, of course, trained to react to it from my cradle: in my family, developing a strong editorial eye was considered only slightly less important than learning to walk; it was simply assumed that the children would grow up to be writers. My parents would not so much as commit my name to a birth certificate without first figuring out how it would look in print.

It’s true. Ask the nurse who kept trying to get them to fill out the paperwork.

I come by my pet peeves honestly, in other words, and believe me, this one gets some exercise, especially now that computer use is practically universal amongst writers.
Why? Word and phrase repetition is substantially harder to catch on a computer screen than in hard copy, even on the great big editor’s model currently gracing my desk. I’ve seen 25-pound Thanksgiving turkeys carried on smaller surfaces, but even so, I prefer to edit on paper. And even then, I still read the final version out loud, to check for flow and repetition problems.

Long-time readers of this blog, chant with me now: NEVER let a submission tumble into a mailbox until after you have read it in its ENTIRETY, in HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD. There are manuscript problems that simply cannot be diagnosed any other way.

I had a hard lesson in this truth myself recently, after I had spent a couple of months working on a book proposal. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of trying to market a nonfiction book, a proposal is as nit-picky a document as they come. Rather than demonstrating that the proposed book is interesting and well-written by, say, handing the finished book to editors, the book proposal limits the actual chapters seen to only one or two — and even those come at the end.

What comes first? A lengthy description of what the book is about, why the author is the best current inhabitant of the earth’s surface to write it, and how it is going to blow every other similar book on the market out of the water. The author is expected to name the volumes to be thus trajected into the air specifically, critiquing them with the full knowledge that the editors who worked on them might well be reading the proposal imminently. Next follows a raft of marketing information, identifying the target readership, naming every mortal organization that might conceivably welcome a speaker on the topic, and so forth. After this exercise in tact, the hapless author is expected to come up with entertaining, well-written descriptions of chapters that have not yet seen the light of day.

THEN comes the sample chapter.

In other words, the NF writer has to prove, over the course of 50 or so pages of discussion of matters inherently less interesting than the subject matter of the book itself, that she can write. Piece o’ cake. It is a format in which a typo is both more important and harder to catch — because, let’s face it, the less fascinating a document is, the more the brain wants to skim through it.

By the time I began printing out the 15 copies for submission, I was relatively certain that the proposal was typo-free, so I did not proof it in hard copy. That was not purely an ego-based decision: there were other readers, too. I am writing the book with a very accomplished woman who lives on the other side of the country, in that OTHER Washington, so every draft of every page has flown back and forth electronically dozens of times. My agent (who wrote a great blog post on THE ROAD the other week, by the way. Would I be represented by someone UN-opinionated?) is an excellent line editor in his own right, and he had given feedback on two versions of it. Surely, I was safe.

You can see this coming, can’t you?

So there I am, printing up copy 12. (I like to print all the physical copies of my work that my agents will be circulating, so I can check each page individually. If a photocopier mangles pg. 173, it’s hard to catch.) Out of habit, I read the latest page out of the printer — and realized with horror that for some reason, three lines on page 47 were in 11-point Times New Roman, not 12-point.

It was a difference so subtle that only a professional reader would have caught it — and then only in hard copy. None of the three of us had noticed in the electronic versions, and I have no idea at what point the switch could have occurred, but that typeface change did subconsciously make those lines seem less important. Since it was a page in the middle of the proposal, though, fixing it would require reprinting ten pages of every single copy I had already printed.

Oh, please — was there even a second of viable suspense here? Of course, I reprinted it. I could always use the discarded pages for scratch paper, and then recycle them. Heck, I could even use them to print up a hard copy draft of the next manuscript I’m planning to send to my agent, so I can check for this kind of mistake properly.

My point is, no matter how sharp-eyed you are, or how smart — my proposal had been read numerous times by two people with Ph.D.s AND an agent, recall — you’re better off proofing in hard copy. A fringe benefit: on paper, it is far more apparent when you’re overusing certain words and phrases.

Which brings me back to my pet peeve. Editors hate repetition for a very practical reason: text that repeats a particular word, phrase, or even sentence structure close together is more tiring for the eye to read than writing that mixes it up more.

Why? Well, let me give you an illustration, as well as I can on a computer screen. Try to read through the coming paragraph as quickly as you can:

Without turning in her seat, Mandy suddenly backed the car into the garage. The garage door closed, sealing her and the car inside. The car was warm, cozy, a great place to die. No one would come into the garage for a week, possibly more, and the children never came in here at all. Thinking of the children, Mandy sank back into her seat, the car’s solidity as comforting as a sturdy umbrella in the midst of a sudden downpour. Without thinking, Mandy pushed in the car’s lighter, heating its coils for the benefit of some future cigarette that might never be smoked.

Okay, stop. Notice anything about how your eye moved down the lines? If you’re like most quick readers, your eye tried to jump from the first use of Mandy’s name directly to the next; it’s a very efficient way to skim. If you’re a more sensitive reader, the repetition of “the garage” twice within four words and “the car” twice within five might have led you to skip the next line entirely.

Apart from encouraging skimming — the last thing you want an agency screener to start doing to your work, right? — word and phrase repetition gives a professional reader the impression that the target market for the book in question is not as well-educated than more diverse set of word choices would indicate. (This is true, incidentally, even if a repeated word is polysyllabic, although to a lesser extent.) The more literary your writing, the more problematic such a perception can be.

The average adult novel is aimed at roughly a tenth-grade reading level; literary fiction tends to assume a college-educated reader, and uses vocabulary accordingly. So whenever you see those ubiquitous Mark Twain and Somerset Maugham quotes about never using a complex word when a simple word will do, realize that both wrote for audiences that had not, by and large, shifted the tassel on a mortarboard cap.

There is yet another reason to avoid word and phrase repetition whenever possible: it tends to slow down the pace of a scene. Let’s take another look at poor Mandy’s final moments with all of those redundant words removed and replaced with specific details — note how much snappier her trip to meet her Maker is in this version:

Without turning in her seat, Mandy suddenly backed into the garage. The door closed, sealing her inside. The car was warm, cozy, a great place to die. No one would come to this end of the mansion for a week, possibly more, and the children never ventured in here at all. She sank back into the rich leather upholstery, the Mercedes’ solidity as comforting as a sturdy umbrella in the midst of an unexpected downpour. Without thinking, she pushed in the lighter, heating its coils for the benefit of some future cigarette that might never be smoked.

It’s definitely a smoother read, isn’t it, without all of those eye-distracting repeated words? Yet look how many more character-revealing specifics I was able to incorporate — why, Mandy moved up several tax brackets in the second-to-last sentence alone. And although it reads more quickly and comfortably, it’s actually not substantially shorter: the original was 103 words, the revised version 97.

If weeding out repetition in just one paragraph can yield this kind of dramatic result, imagine all of the room you could clear for telling little details if you eliminated similar redundancies throughout an entire manuscript. You might want to print out a copy of your book — perhaps on the back of all that paper I had to discard from my proposal — and try it sometime.

There are, of course, many flavors of redundancy to torment editorial souls. Next time, I shall dive into another very common species that, in its most virulent form, has broken the tension of many an otherwise worthy scene. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

PS: Congratulations to long-time reader Brian Mercer, who has just sold an article to Llewellyn Publications. Way to go, Brian!

(And please, everybody, remember to keep sending in news of your triumphs, so we can all celebrate. I love reporting good news about my readers’ writing careers!)

Posted on - No Comments on Trust and mistrust: what every conference attendee should know about pitching to editors at conferences

Trust and mistrust: what every conference attendee should know about pitching to editors at conferences

Yesterday, I was waxing poetic on a must-follow piece of conference-selection advice — if you are looking for an agent, only invest in attending conferences where agents with a proven track record of selling with your type of book will be available for your pitching pleasure. Feel free to derive an important corollary from this excellent axiom: from this moment on, ONLY pitch or query your book to agents who represent that kind of book.

Seems so simple, put that way, doesn’t it? Yet the vast majority of aspiring writers either take a scattershot approach, querying fairly randomly (thus all of those “Dear Agent” letters that folks in the industry hate so much) or let the conferences do the selection for them, pitching to whoever is there with a winsome disregard for matching their books with the right agent.

I cannot say this often enough: you do not want to be signed by just ANY agent — although, in the throes of agent-seeking, it’s certainly easy to start believing that any agent at all would be better than none. You want the agent who is going to be able to sell your work quickly and well.

Believe it or not, even the surliest agent who ever strode contemptuously into a literary conference and brushed off a pitcher wants this as well.

Agents, perversely enough, want to sign authors of books they know they can sell. Since they are inundated with queries and pitches, it is in their best interests to weed out the absolutely-nots as swiftly as humanly possible. So if you’re rejected by an agent who doesn’t represent your kind of work — at a conference or via query — it doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of your writing or the idea you are pitching. It’s just about a bad fit.

I know it’s hard to accept when your baby is rejected out of hand, but it is vital for your professional mental health that you bear the issue of fit in mind constantly while you are pitching and querying. Not only isn’t anything personal about a bad-fit rejection — it does not even begin to be a fair test of how the book will fly with an agent who does represent that kind of work.

The best way to avoid this kind of rejection, of course, is not to pitch or query your book to any agent that isn’t predisposed to be interested in it.

Check before you pitch. Even better, check before you register for the conference where you intend to pitch.

Ditto with editors — no editor in the business acquires across every genre; in fact, most editors’ ability to acquire is sharply limited by their publishing houses to just one or two types of book. So it would be a waste of your pitching energies to, say, try to interest an editor who does exclusively mysteries in your fantasy novel, right?

One major caveat about pitching to editors at conferences: be aware that all of the major NYC publishing houses currently have policies forbidding their editors to acquire work by unagented writers. This means, in essence, that the BEST that could happen if you pitched your book to an editor from one of these houses is that he might help you hook up with an agent.

I mention this, because in most of the flavors of common being-discovered-at-a-conference fantasy, an editor from Random House or somewhere similar hears a pitch, falls over backwards in his chair, and offers a publication contract on the spot, neatly bypassing the often extended agent-seeking period entirely. Conference today, contract tomorrow, Oprah on Thursday.

In reality, even if an editor was blown over (figuratively, at least) by a pitch, he might buttonhole one of the attending agents at a conference cocktail party on your behalf, and they might together plot a future for the book, but you’re still going to have to impress that agent before you can sign with the editor.

Before any of you protest that at the last conference you attended, editors asked for your work as though they intended to pick you up, allow me to add: the we-accept-only-the-agented is most assuredly NOT the impression that most conference pitchers to editors receive.

There’s a reason for this: unless they are asked point-blank during an editors’ forum how many of them have come to the conference empowered to pick up a new author on the spot — a question well worth asking, hint, hint — most editors who attend conferences will speak glowingly about their authors, glossing over the fact that they met these authors not in settings like this, but through well-connected agents.

Adding to the mystique is the fact that few conference brochures or websites are honest enough to feature the major houses’ policies next to the appropriate attending editors’ listings. In fact, most conference rhetoric surrounding pitch appointments with editors directly states the opposite, encouraging pitchers to believe that this meeting could be their big break.

I don’t think conference organizers do this in order to be mean or misleading — I just think many of them are not hip to the current conditions of the industry. I don’t know what the declaiming editors’ excuse is, but trust me, no editor is going to jeopardize his job at Ballentine by handing a contract to a writer his boss would throw a fit if he signed.

So why, you may be wondering, do editors from the majors attend literary conferences — and, once there, why do they request submissions?

Editors from the major houses request manuscripts from pitchers all the time — but not because they are looking to sign the author on the strength of the book. They just want to get in on the ground floor if the book is going to be the next…

You guessed it. No editor wants to be the one who passed on the next DA VINCI CODE.

It’s a gamble, pure and simple. So even though they would not in fact pick up the next DA VINCI CODE if its author DID pitch to them at a conference, having a personal connection with the author is a great means of queue-jumping. If one of them is nice enough to you, you might tell your agent (once you hook up with one) that you want your potential bestseller sent to that editor first. Heck, if she’s nice enough to you, you might be gullible enough to insist that she gets an exclusive.

Don’t laugh: it’s not a bad gamble, from their perspective. Aspiring writers, as I have pointed out before, can get some strange ideas about loyalty owed to industry types who met them for a grand total of fifteen minutes once.

But trust me: deep in their steamy little hearts, those editors from major houses who ask you to send chapters will be hoping that you will land an agent before they get around to reading the manuscript they requested you send. If you are looking to pitch to an editor who might conceivably pick up your book right away, you are generally better off pitching to an editor from a smaller house.

The overall moral: learning what individual agents and editors are looking for (aside from the next DA VINCI CODE, of course) will help you target both your conference pitches and your queries more effectively.

Don’t worry — I’m not going to abandon you to attempt this formidable task alone. Over the next couple of weeks, I am going to show you how to decipher those opaque little blurbs about their preferences that conference organizers are so fond of adding to their websites and brochures, as well as how to find out who represents and buys what from other sources.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Getting the feedback you need, Part IX: on beyond “I hope you like it.”

Getting the feedback you need, Part IX: on beyond “I hope you like it.”

Welcome to the final installment of my ongoing series on steps you can take to improve the feedback you get from non-professional first readers – for those of you just tuning in, that’s any pre-publication reader for your book who is not paid (by you or anyone else) to give you feedback.

In other words, the vast majority of first readers.

Yesterday, Tip #11 advised you to give your first readers a list of questions, preferably in writing, at the same time as giving them the manuscript. That way, the readers will know what to be reading for; you will get your most important questions answered, and less experienced first readers will have the guidance they need to keep from floundering about in the text, desperately searching for something helpful to say. That’s a whole lot of birds with one relatively small stone, isn’t it?

So far, I have presented Tip #11 as requiring merely effort, honesty, and advance planning to pull off, but in practice, it also requires a fair amount of chutzpah. Far more, in fact, than simply shoving a manuscript at a willing friend and murmuring some gentle platitudes about hoping he enjoys reading it. It requires not only taking one’s own writing seriously enough to demand useful feedback, but putting one’s wee foot down and insisting that other people do so as well.

Personally, I find this empowering, but over the years, several of my loyal, intelligent, talented advisees have informed me that they find Tip #11 far and away the most distasteful of the lot. They consider it pushy, if not downright presumptuous: empathetic souls, they feel that creating and handing over such a list implies doubt about the first readers’ reading ability, if not actual intelligence.

If anything beyond “Just tell me what you think” feels overly dictatorial to you, consider this: there is not a literary contest in the world that does not provide written instructions to its judges on how to evaluate contest entries. Screeners at agencies are almost invariably handed lists of desirable traits to seek as they read through submissions, as well as lists of criteria for instantaneous rejection, as are editorial assistants at publishing houses.

Which begs the question: if experienced professional readers work along pre-set guidelines, why should amateur readers be expected to perform the same task without guidance?

To turn the question around, haven’t you ever noticed how first readers new to the task almost always have difficulty giving specific feedback, even if they loved the book? Haven’t you noticed how they tend to freak out a little if they are asked pointed questions? Heck, haven’t you noticed how often this is the case with readers of published books, too? Ask for a detailed analysis of any written material, and most readers will suddenly find it difficult to breathe.

As a former professor, I can tell you exactly what that panicked flash in their eyes means: it’s the fight-or-flight response of a student suddenly tested on material he thought would not be on the test. From the unguided reader’s POV, being grilled by an anxious author is like a pop quiz on material read for fun. Nip this anxiety in the bud: give your first readers a study guide, so they’ll know what’s going to be on the test.

Writers are far less likely to have this response, of course, for obvious reasons: we were the folks who got As in English. Hand us an essay question about a book, and we’ll go on for hours, won’t we?

But just for a moment, try to identify with the huge majority of the population that does not have this instinctive response to being asked to product a book report.

Do you remember that professor in college or that teacher in high school who used to madden you at exam time with vague questions, ones so broad that they essentially invited you to spill out every minor fact you had managed to memorize? “Compare and contrast the Renaissance with the Middle Ages,” for instance, or “Was the League of Nations a good idea?” or “The Emancipation Proclamation: what were the arguments on both sides?” Or the ever-popular ploy of giving you a quote, and asking you to relate it to the reading? Perhaps something along the lines of this little gem:

“There is no ‘objective’ or universal tone in literature, for however long we have been told here is. There is only the white, middle-class male tone.” — Carolyn Heilbrun, WRITING A WOMAN’S LIFE
Relate this quote to the works of Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Dave Barry, Truman Capote, Charles Dickens, Jeffrey Eugenides, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, Anaïs Nin, Philip Roth, Edith Wharton, and Marvel Comics. Make your answer text-based, and use specific examples.

Students look at this sort of question and wish that they would be struck by bolts of lightning on the spot – which, in essence, they have. “What the heck does “relate” mean in this context?” they wonder, surreptitiously sharpening their pencils into weapons of mayhem.

My dissertation advisor used to favor rambling quarter-page ruminations on the nature of life, without out ever articulating a question she desired students to answer. I like to call this the “what color am I thinking?” school of test-giving, because it requires the students to guess, with virtually no guidance, what the teacher wants to see in the essay.

My high school biology teacher, more vague than most, simply walked into class on the day of our big plant life exam, handed each of us a three-foot-long stretch of butcher paper, and told us, “Show me everything you know about plants.” Was it an invitation to draw lilies for an hour, or an entreaty to write haiku? No one knew until after the exams were graded.

It drove you nuts in school, right? Well, first readers given no guidance by the authors who have handed them manuscripts often feel as annoyed and helpless as you felt when faced with those kind of vague exam questions, especially if they’ve never read a manuscript (as opposed to a book) before. The format is substantially different, for one thing (if that’s news to you, please see the FORMATING MANUSCRIPTS category at right), and let’s face it, it’s an intimidating thing to be faced with the task of evaluating the creative output of someone’s soul.

Unless, of course, you are being paid to do it. If it’s any consolation for those of you who were told that your English degrees had no use in the real world, virtually every editorial memo I have ever seen has been a “What color am I thinking?” document: the manuscript is not quite right for these reasons; now go away and show me what the plot would be like with most of the major elements removed. Junior editors at publishing houses took those essay tests, too, and aced ‘em. And now, bless their hearts, they have transformed those bsing compare-and-contrast skills into a life’s work.

For the reader who is not also a writer, the implied obligation not only to point out problems but to suggest viable solutions can be completely overwhelming. Following Tip #11 will decrease everyone’s stress levels – and providing written parameters for criticism at the same time that you hand over your manuscript is an easy way to minimize the potential for future misunderstandings. Even just one or two questions will be helpful to your reader.

There’s no need to turn it into a major research project, or to inundate your readers with ten-page lists of questions. Stick to a simple 1-2 pp. questionnaire about the book, highlighting the areas you feel could use some work. For the sake of your ego, it’s also a dandy idea to include questions about parts that you know you have pulled off well. (For an excellent example of a simple list, check out Mary’s comment on yesterday’s post.)

Be as specific as you can – questions along the lines of “What did you think of my protagonist?” tend to elicit less helpful responses than “Was there any point in the book where you felt the tension lapsed? At what point did you feel most interested in the plot?” I always like to add some offbeat questions, to make the process more amusing for the reader: “Did anything in the book make you laugh out loud?” and “What in the plot surprised you most?” can provoke some revealing responses.

If you are uncomfortable with the idea of a questionnaire, make a few specific requests, either verbally or in writing. Verbally, I have found that coupling very pointed suggestions with compliments works best:

“You’re always so good at foreseeing plot twists in movies – what do you think I could do to make my book’s plot more astonishing?”
“You’re the best cook I know – I would really appreciate it if you would keep an eye out for sensual details that did or did not work. Did I bring in the senses of smell and taste enough?”
“Look, I’ve never done time, and you have, so I would love your feedback on what is and isn’t realistic in my portrayal of prison life.”

Remember, this is an exercise in getting you the feedback YOU need, so the more honest you can be with yourself and your first readers, the better. If you are feeling insecure, it is completely legitimate to say:

“Look, this is my baby, and I’m nervous about it. Yes, I would love it if you flagged all of the typos you saw, but what I think would help me most is if you told me what is GOOD about my book.”

And finally, all throughout the process, observe Tip #12: Be HUGELY grateful for your first readers’ help.

Yes, I know, I sound like your mother (are you sitting up straight?), but honestly, this is a situation where politeness really pays off in both the long and short terms. Here is a wonderful person who has – for reasons of friendship, bribery, or idle curiosity – agreed to devote many, many hours of her time to giving your manuscript a good, hard reading. She has let you blandish her into that most difficult and dangerous of tasks, telling the truth to a friend.

And if that’s not an occasion for sending some flowers, I should like to know what is. Not only to be polite, but to be instrumental: if this first reader turns out to be a good one, won’t you want to use her for your next book, too?

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 4 Comments on Getting the feedback you need, Part VIII: eliciting the specifics

Getting the feedback you need, Part VIII: eliciting the specifics

As my ongoing holiday gift to you, my readers, I have been running a series about how to get the most from non-professional feedback – which, let’s face it, is the vast majority of the substantive feedback aspiring writers get. As those of you who have queried or submitted are already aware, the agent or editor who gives concrete feedback to a rejected manuscript is rapidly growing as extinct as a bespectacled dodo speaking Latin and writing in cuneiform on the walls of a pyramid.

Sad, but true, alas, and thus it’s not the most efficient use of your energies to resent an obviously form rejection when it is sent to you. But how on earth is a writer to know what needs to be changed (other than the current super-tightness of the fiction market, which is making agents all over Manhattan yank wee hairs out of their already-troubled scalps) before a book looks yummy to the folks in the industry?

You could, of course, always pay a freelance editor to run through your work with a fine-toothed hacksaw, but most aspiring writers are reluctant to shell out the dosh for this service. After all, pretty much everyone who has had the self-discipline to write an entire book did so while living on the hope of other people paying to read it; to most writers, the prospect of paying a reader to struggle through their prose is pretty distasteful.

And even though I make a hefty chunk of my living being paid to do precisely that, I’m going to be honest with you here: most editors at major publishing houses, when asked at conferences if getting professional help is necessary, will get downright huffy at the notion. Good writers, they will tell you, need no such help.

This sounds very noble, doesn’t it? Until the 50th time you hear this exchange, when it dawns upon you that perhaps these editors hear the question as a critique of their ilk’s propensity to perform line editing, rather than as evidence of a writer trying to figure out how to navigate the publishing world. (Editors get cranky at the mention of the fact that they do a whole lot of things other than edit these days.) Oh, and their definition of a good writer is someone who never makes grammatical or spelling mistakes, is intimately familiar with the strictures of standard format, has a metronome implanted in her brain so that pacing is always absolutely even, has never written a bad sentence, and plots like a horror film director.

In short, the writer they have in mind when they give the advice has an internal editor powerful enough to run Random House. For those of us who have not yet had Toni Morrison surgically implanted in our brains, blue pencil in microscopic hand, an extra pair of eyes can be very helpful.

However, if you are not getting feedback from someone who is being paid to do it (i.e., an agent, editor, writing teacher, or freelance editor), or members of a writing group with experience working on your type of book, or a writer in your chosen genre – which is to say, if you are like 99% of feedback-seekers in North America – then you are almost certainly going to be seeking feedback from first readers who have no previous experience in manuscript critique. When the writer does not set out ground rules to guide inexperienced first readers, trouble often ensues.

All of which is a long-winded way of introducing the single best thing you can do to head off problems before they start — Tip #11: Give your first readers written directions for feedback.

Ideally, these directions will include a list of specific questions you would like answered about the reading experience. Providing a brief list of written questions may seem a bit pushy at first, but believe me, if your reader finds herself floundering for something to say, she will be immensely grateful that you gave her some advance guidance. And you, in turn, are far more likely to receive the kind of feedback most helpful to you than if you remain politely mum.

Coming up with specific questions will also force you to figure out what you in fact do want from your first readers. You may discover that you actually do not want feedback; maybe you want support instead. Maybe you want recognition from your kith and kin that you have completed a project as major as a book. If so, it is important to recognize your desires before you hear any critique from your first readers – if you were seeking praise, and your reader thought you were looking for constructive criticism, both you and your reader will end up unhappy.

Bringing your expectations into sync will substantially raise the probability of the exchange being positive for everyone concerned – as long as you are honest with yourself about what you really want and set realistic goals. Hint: “I want for Daddy to say for the first time in my life that he’s proud of me” might not be the best reason to hand dear old Dad your manuscript. But “I want the experience of my work being read closely by someone I know is not going to say anything harsh afterward” is every bit as praiseworthy a goal as “I want someone to tell me how to make this book marketable.”

The trick lies in figuring out precisely what you want, finding a person who can deliver it, and asking directly to receive it. And if that sounds like sex-column advice to you, well, there’s a reason for that: everyone is looking for something slightly different, so the more straightforwardly you can describe your desired outcome, the more likely you are to get what you really want.

I cannot emphasize too much that it is PERFECTLY legitimate to decide that you actually do not want dead-honest critique, IF your first readers that in advance. If upon mature reflection you realize that you want to show your work to your kith and kin in order to gain gentle feedback in a supportive environment (rather than in a cut-throat professional forum, where your feelings will not be spared at all), that’s a laudable goal — as long as neither you nor your first readers EXPECT you to derive specific, informative revision feedback from the experience. “Don’t worry about proofreading, Sis,” you can say. “I have other readers who can give me technical feedback. Just enjoy.”

If you want to be a professional writer, however, you will eventually need to harden yourself to feedback; the rather commonly-held notion that really GOOD writing never gets criticized is a myth. Not only does professional writing routinely get ripped apart and sewn back together (ask anyone who has ever written a newspaper article), but even amongst excellent editors and publishing higher-ups, there will always be honest differences of opinion about how a book should run.

So the sooner you can get accustomed to taking critique in a constructive spirit, the better. And the happier you will be on that dark day when an editor who has already purchased your manuscript says, “You know, I don’t like your villain. Take him out, and have the revision to me by the end of next week,” or “You know, I think your characters’ ethnicity is a distraction. Instead of Chinese-Americans from San Francisco, could they be Irish-Americans from Boston?” or “Oh, your protagonist’s lesbian sister? Change her to a Republican brother.”

You think these examples are jokes? Would you like me to introduce you to the writers who heard them first-hand? Would you care to know which one I saw on a major publishing house’s letterhead within the last three months?

Yes, good critique can be invaluable to clarifying fuzzy places in the book, but in terms of your entire career, it’s helpful to think of non-professional feedback as spring training for when you’re playing in the big leagues. While you are testing your throwing arm with the non-professional catchers, you will get better practice take the time to set out exactly the questions you want your first readers to have in mind while they read.

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the best analogy. If you were trying to completely rewrite a book at an editor’s behest by the end of next week, your analogy-construction skills might be a trifle warped from overuse, too. The fact remains, you will get better feedback with a written list of questions than without it.

Do I hear some disgruntled murmuring out there? “Whoa, there, baby,” I know some of you will say. (And just whom do you think you are calling baby?) “I won’t get to set up guidelines for readers who buy my book after it is published. What’s wrong with just letting my first readers pretend to be those book-buyers, so I can work with their completely spontaneous reactions?”

Pretty smart question, cupcake, and one that richly deserves an answer – in fact, one with many parts. In the first place, buyers in bookstores will not know you personally. Their reactions, unless they happen to meet you at a book signing or write reader reviews on Amazon or someplace similar, will forever remain a mystery to you.

Your first readers, on the other hand, do know you, and presumably will be interacting with you in future social situations. They will probably want to be considerate of your feelings – which automatically renders giving honest critique even of excellent writing much harder for them. That’s going to kill pretty much all of the spontaneity of their reactions right off the bat.

Second, when a non-professional reader is, as I have been pointing out, doing the writer a great big favor. Good first readers are charming, generous people who deserve every piece of assistance a writer can give them; it is only fair to let them know in advance what kind of critique you are hoping to see.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the response of readers who buy your book will come after it is too late for you to revise it. By contrast, your first readers are giving you feedback early enough in the process to influence the book before it goes to press, and generally before it is seen by agents or editors. The better their feedback is, the easier it is for you to incorporate – and the more specific your questions can be at the outset of the reading process, the more likely you are to receive great, useable feedback.

Tomorrow, I shall wrap up this series. In the meantime, it’s a brand-new year: why not celebrate by backing up your documents onto a Greatest Hits of 2006 disk? Or at least back it up to your iPod?

Oh, and keep up the good work!

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

Eye on the prize: living with feedback

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

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

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

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

Say, by Epiphany.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on - 2 Comments on Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part III: will someone hold this massive grain of salt for me?

Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part III: will someone hold this massive grain of salt for me?

The last couple of days’ posts have been kind of in-your-face, haven’t they? Sorry about that — it’s the nature of the beast, when the ruling out of submissions is the subject. It makes us all feel as if we’ve been mauled by wildebeests.

Still, there’s no need to despair: to succeed in this business, all you need to do is make your initial pages technically perfect, fresh without being weird, and not hit either any of the pet peeves listed on the Idol list (see Halloween post) or personal ones that the agent in question might have. Your characters need to be original, your premise interesting, and your plot riveting, beginning from Paragraph 1. Oh, and you need to be lucky enough not to submit your brilliant novel about an airline pilot on the day after the agent/screener/editorial assistant/editor has had his/her heart broken by one.

Piece o’ proverbial cake, right? Well, my work is done here. Let me know how it all turns out!

Okay, so it’s not such a piece of cake: it’s a genuinely tall order, and a long list of don’t can be very, very intimidating. Before you throw up your hands in despair, let’s break down the Idol list of rejection reasons into bite-sized chunks.

The first thing to realize about this list of agents’ pet peeves is that some of them are, in fact, personal pet peeves, not necessarily industry-wide red flags. The trick is recognizing which ones. Right off the bat, a cursory glance at the list identified these as probably personal, rather than endemic:

15. The opening had a character do something that characters only do in books, not real life.
25. The first lines were dialogue.
33. Agent can’t identify with the conflict shown.
37. The story is corny.
42. The opening scene is too violent (in the example that generated this response, a baby’s brains were bashed out against a tree).
43. Too gross.
44. There is too much violence to children and/or pets.
46. The story is written in the second person.
47. The story is written in the first person plural.
48. The narrator speaks directly to the reader (“I should warn you…”), making the story hyper-aware of itself qua story.

How do I know these are not widely-shared rejection criteria? Well, experience, but also, critical analysis. Allow me to explain.

Before I start dissecting them, however, one caveat: just because these particular pet peeves are agent-specific does not mean that you should simply disregard them. If you are planning to submit to any of the agents on that particular panel, it would behoove you to take them very seriously indeed: one of the reasons that savvy writers go to conferences, after all, is to pick up information about the specific likes and dislikes of particular agents, right? Use this information strategically, to help target your queries and submissions to the agents most likely to enjoy your work.

When you’re listening to such a panel, there are a couple of signals that will alert you to something being an individual’s pet peeve, rather than a general rule. First — and this happens surprisingly frequently — the person uttering it will actually say, “Maybe it’s just my pet peeve, but…” or “It really bugs me when…” It’s a pretty safe bet that what is said next is a personal preference.

I know: it’s subtle.

Also — and this happened on the Idol panel — sometimes an agent will express an opinion, and the other agents will guffaw at him, fall over backwards in surprise, slap him across the face and tell him he’s an idiot, etc. Again, all of these are pretty good indicators that we’re not talking about a widely-recognized agency norm here.

Take, for instance, #25, when agent Daniel Lazar’s having flagged a submission because the first lines were dialogue. Now, this is a pretty sweeping criticism, isn’t it? A lot of very good books open with dialogue. So how did the people in the Idol audience know it was his pet peeve? Well, he began his critique with, “Maybe it’s just me, but…” And after he said it, the agent sitting next to him turned to him and said, “Really?”

Starting to get the hang of this?

I know I’ve been saying it a lot lately, but it bears repeating: no matter how much talk there is about how agents all want to represent the same kinds of books, it’s just not the case — they are individuals, with individual tastes. And thus, logically, if your submission is rejected by one, you have most emphatically NOT been rejected by the entire industry: you’ve been rejected by one individual within it. Learn what you can from the experience, then move on.

This can be very, very tough for writers who have just spent a small fortune on a conference, pitched to five agents, and had requested materials rejected to do. Yet at even the best conference, no group of agents small enough to fit in the same room, much less on the same panel, are a representative sample of how the entire industry will react to your work. I know it’s discouraging, but it just doesn’t make statistical sense to throw up one’s hands after a single round of rejections.

To put this in perspective, it’s not uncommon for an agent to submit a client’s work to as many as 50 different editors. If #48 says yes, that’s a win, just as surely as if #1 did. Should you really be any less tenacious in marketing your book to agents than you would expect your agent to be in marketing it to editors?

Now that you know why it is so important to differentiate between what you absolutely must change on your first page and what you should change for a particular agent’s eyes, let’s go back to our list of rejection reasons. When in doubt, ask yourself, “Why is that particular one problematic?” Often, the most obvious answer will be that it’s the agent’s personal opinion.

Let’s apply this test to #15, the opening had a character do something that characters only do in books, not real life. On the panel, Rachel Vater cited this reason quite often, but neither of the other agents mentioned it. (Did that make your personal-preference antennae perk up, campers?) She gave those who were listening another clue: a couple of times, she cast this objection as,
“Well, I’VE never done what the character does here…” Ding ding ding!

Even if she had not been kind enough to flag this as a personal preference, we probably could have figured it out. In this context, she specifically singled out a character who shook his head to clear an image or bring himself back to reality, as in, “he shook his head to clear the cobwebs.” Now, as an editor, I do have to admit, this is an action that one sees occur with GREAT frequency in manuscripts; in fact, I suspect one could make a pretty good case without trying very hard for labeling it as a cliché.

However, this is not how the rejection reason was phrased, was it? No, it was cast as “this is something a normal person would not do.” Unless we’re talking about psychopathic behavior, a statement like this is almost certainly based upon personal experience. Everyone’s opinion of normal is different.

So what this critique is really saying is, “People in my circles and from my background don’t do such things.” Fine; good to know: now we can target the submission away from the agent who cannot imagine doing such a thing and toward an agent who can.

Getting the hang of this yet?

The same logic test can be applied, with the same result, to #33 (agent can’t identify with the conflict shown, which is obviously based upon personal taste) and #37 (the story is corny, which must be based upon the observer’s background and worldview). Note the preference, and move on to the next agent.

If you get the same response from a few different agents, it might be worth a second look at your opening pages for plausibility. For the sake of your future success, it is probably worth bearing in mind that an awfully high percentage of agents and editors are from upper-middle clad backgrounds, and thus graduated from rather similar English departments at rather similar liberal arts colleges, mostly in the northeastern part of the country. Their brothers (and sisters) dated one another’s sisters (and brothers). If you can’t imagine reading from such a point of view, it might behoove you to find a first reader who can, to subject your manuscript to the Minor Ivy Plausibility Test.

The personal preference test, believe it or not, can also be applied to reasons associated with voice choice. Yes, I know: since it’s a technical matter, it seems as though rules should govern whether it’s acceptable, right? Not really. There are plenty of agents and editors who don’t like the first person voice much, and, as we saw on the list, other voices may raise hackles: 46. The story is written in the second person; 47. The story is written in the first person plural. What could such statements be OTHER than personal preferences?

#48 (the narrator speaks directly to the reader, making the story hyper-aware of itself qua story) is also a personal preference about narrative voice, albeit a more subtle one: for some readers, including the agent who cited this rejection reason, a first-person narration that breaks the third wall is jarring, a distraction from the story. However, there are plenty examples of published books that have used this device to great comic or dramatic effect: I would not send the agent that expressed this preference THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, for instance.

Now, I suspect that those of you intrepid souls out there devoted enough to literary experimentation to write a narrative in the first person plural (like THE VIRGIN SUICIDES) or second person (like BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY) are probably already aware that your work will not be to everyone’s taste, any more than excellent fantasy writing will be to the taste of an agent who prefers hard-bitten realism. But this doesn’t mean that the experiment isn’t worth trying, is it? Just choose your querying targets accordingly.

I should wrap up for today, but before I do, I want to take a quick run at another group of reasons, #42 (the opening scene is too violent), #43 (the opening scene is too gross), and #44 (there is too much violence to children and/or pets). The first two are obviously in the eye of the beholder: a quick look at any bookstore will tell you that there is no shortage of violent material. So it can’t possibly be an industry-wide rule, right?

However, pay close attention when an agent draws a line about this: this is not an agent to query with a violent piece, and he’s doing the people who write violent pieces a favor by being up front about it. (For instance, an agent who asks that I do not mention him here — see post of May 10, 2006 for explanation — routinely tells conference attendees not to send him children-in-peril stories; he doesn’t like them.) Do be aware that although most of us have had writing teachers beat into our brains that a story needs an opening hook, to draw the reader in, it is possible to go too far.

And because 99% of the writers out there have had this advice beaten into their brains, too, agents see a LOT of shocking things on first pages. A super-violent opening scene, then, will not necessarily make your submission unique.

Which is why I slipped in #44 (there is too much violence to children and/or pets). Yes, this is a matter of personal preference — how much violence is too much and how much is just right is in the eye of the beholder, just as much as ideal porridge temperatures were on the tongues of the Three Bears — but this one happens to be a preference that at LOT of editors share, and for good reason: it can be very hard to market a book that features a lot of violence against wee ones. And don’t even get me started about how hard it would be to sell a cozy mystery with a dead cat in it…

My overall point has, I hope, become clear. Everyone chant together now: “Never kill off the detective’s pet kitty.”

Well, yes, that’s a pretty good rule of thumb, but I was really thinking of a broader point about submission and conference lore: not everything that pops out of an expert’s mouth should be regarded as a hard-and-fast rule. Use your judgment, or you might end up staggering under the weight of such a heap of pronouncements that you’ll be terrified of breaking a rule every time you sit down at your keyboard.

I’ll try to demystify more of the Idol rejection reasons tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part II: why are those first readings so harsh, anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See why those first few pages are important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s it.

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

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

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

Blame HER ever-expanding job description.

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

Posted on - 2 Comments on Continuing education

Continuing education

I’ve spent the last two days at the Flathead Writers’ Conference in Whitefish, Montana, my favorite of the small regional conferences. Now, the seminar I was teaching safely over (the essential, mundane one in a field of motivational speeches: I was doing the ABCs of submission. SOMEONE needs to tell the world about standard format!)

There are a lot of these small (under 100 attendees) conferences around the country: unlike the bigger conferences, they tend to be focused more upon craft and less upon marketing and pitching opportunities. Here, there is one agent {name removed at agent’s request; please see post of May 10, 2006 for explanation}, one editor (Kristen Weber of Penguin, which has a policy, the last I heard, of not picking up unagented writers), a very successful magazine article-writer (the wonderful Carolyn Campbell), a screenwriter (the funny Mark Troy), established novelists ranging from the well-known to the less so (Robert Levinson, Pam Houston, Dennis Foley), and yours truly. Oh, and a conference room with the requisite super-dry air inside and gorgeous scenery outside to distract us.

And why is it, I wonder, that writers’ conferences always start at the crack o’ dawn? Just once, I would like to go to a conference that acknowledges that some, if not most, writers are night birds. Fortunately, my class was at night, so I was safely wide-awake without the help of too much of the pudding-thick coffee they like to serve in these parts. (Little Westernisms pepper people’s speech here. It’s one of the only places I know where I am consistently referred to as “gal.”)

Since I’m going to ANOTHER conference next weekend, I’m going to hold off on talking too much here about what a conference is like, for the benefit of those of you who have never been to one. Instead, I’d like to talk for a moment about why those of you who already have agents, or are already published, might want to go to one or two per year — and why, yes, I actually do sit in on classes at conferences where I am teaching.

Continuing education, my friends. As in a tax-deductible (if you file a Schedule C as a writer, that is) way to help improve your chances of success in your chosen field.

Are those of you long-time readers who know me as the iconoclast who keeps assuring you that a fairly hefty proportion of the marketing information given out at conferences is outdated smiling right about now?

Well, it’s still true: of the four novelists speaking here, I am apparently the only one who has ever had to do extensive querying. (If I told you how easily Pam Houston — whose COWBOYS ARE MY WEAKNESS is brilliant, by the way — says she got her editor and agent, IN THAT ORDER, you might well want to throw something through the nearest window.) And that differential is, in all modesty, entirely due to the fact that the other novelists got their agents and sold their first books more than 15 years ago, and I more recently.

The industry has DEFINITELY changed, and don’t let anybody, no matter how well-known or powerful, tell you it hasn’t.

Which is a pretty good reason to keep going to writers’ conferences, actually: what sold 15 years ago, or 5, or even 1, is not necessarily what is selling today. Things change (A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, anyone?), and even though, yes, it is often kind of annoying to listen to agents and editors spout the same old platitudes about how good writing always finds a home and indignantly deny that editors don’t edit anymore, they ARE working in the industry right now and DO know what is and isn’t hot. So it’s as good an idea to consult their expertise from time to time as it is to read Publisher’s Marketplace to see who is buying what.

Although I can’t resist sharing one particularly funny quip: in the midst of said requisite indignant speech about how editors at the major houses do so edit still, the editor — unusual for her ilk — actually offered a bit of proof to back up her statement. “I write a four-page memo on every book,” she said, evidently expecting us all to be blown away by that level of feedback.

Now, four pages of feedback (and editorial memos are generally in correspondence format, and thus single-spaced) are certainly not insubstantial, by any means, even when it probably does not mean any line editing at all. Truth compels me to say, however, that by editing standards in the freelance world, it is a tad on the scant side: it’s not all that unusual for me to write 4 pages of feedback on a CHAPTER. And the editor-who-shall-remain-nameless-here-until-she-makes-an-offer wrote two on my novel, a book that she has not yet bought.

Once again, a translation problem, an expectations gap between what writers think the industry should provide and what people in the industry actually do.

So there is another good reason to do a little continuing ed from time to time: the more you know about the industry, the funnier some of these throw-away lines become. Also, while I believe that talent is inherent, writing is a business, and craft is an array of skills — two of the three, then, can be learned, and what can be learned can be polished up.

I have to say, at my point in the writing game, the benefit I derive from attending craft classes is often from the throwaway lines, rather than the main thrust of the courses themselves. But still, a useful insight is a useful insight. For instance, yesterday Robert Levinson suggested that one way to make a plot compelling is to place your protagonist in a situation in which the reader may have fantasized being, and thus allow the reader to live vicariously something he has always wanted to do.

Now, the operative word here is HE, my professional antennae tell me — Mssr. Levinson does, after all, write in a genre with a heavy male readership, which is in itself unusual for fiction. But since his first book was about an imagined affair between Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe (they were on the 20th Century Fox lot at the same time — although, since she was both starring in and producing BUS STOP at that particular point, I don’t know when she would have had the time), I suspect the gentleman knows just a BIT about dealing with his readers’ fantasy lives. I suspect, in turn, that it’s a pretty good piece of advice.

I might actually use that tip in my current novel revision. Which would alone have justified the price of admission, if I hadn’t been scheduled to teach down the hall.

I could go on and on about what people are learning here, but I should scoot off to another seminar. Details follow later, of course. I’m taking good notes for all of you.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Continuing education

Continuing education

I’ve spent the last two days at the Flathead Writers’ Conference in Whitefish, Montana, my favorite of the small regional conferences. Now, the seminar I was teaching safely over (the essential, mundane one in a field of motivational speeches: I was doing the ABCs of submission. SOMEONE needs to tell the world about standard format!)

There are a lot of these small (under 100 attendees) conferences around the country: unlike the bigger conferences, they tend to be focused more upon craft and less upon marketing and pitching opportunities. Here, there is one agent {name removed at agent’s request; please see post of May 10, 2006 for explanation}, one editor (Kristen Weber of Penguin, which has a policy, the last I heard, of not picking up unagented writers), a very successful magazine article-writer (the wonderful Carolyn Campbell), a screenwriter (the funny Mark Troy), established novelists ranging from the well-known to the less so (Robert Levinson, Pam Houston, Dennis Foley), and yours truly. Oh, and a conference room with the requisite super-dry air inside and gorgeous scenery outside to distract us.

And why is it, I wonder, that writers’ conferences always start at the crack o’ dawn? Just once, I would like to go to a conference that acknowledges that some, if not most, writers are night birds. Fortunately, my class was at night, so I was safely wide-awake without the help of too much of the pudding-thick coffee they like to serve in these parts. (Little Westernisms pepper people’s speech here. It’s one of the only places I know where I am consistently referred to as “gal.”)

Since I’m going to ANOTHER conference next weekend, I’m going to hold off on talking too much here about what a conference is like, for the benefit of those of you who have never been to one. Instead, I’d like to talk for a moment about why those of you who already have agents, or are already published, might want to go to one or two per year – and why, yes, I actually do sit in on classes at conferences where I am teaching.

Continuing education, my friends. As in a tax-deductible (if you file a Schedule C as a writer, that is) way to help improve your chances of success in your chosen field.

Are those of you long-time readers who know me as the iconoclast who keeps assuring you that a fairly hefty proportion of the marketing information given out at conferences is outdated smiling right about now?

Well, it’s still true: of the four novelists speaking here, I am apparently the only one who has ever had to do extensive querying. (If I told you how easily Pam Houston – whose COWBOYS ARE MY WEAKNESS is brilliant, by the way – says she got her editor and agent, IN THAT ORDER, you might well want to throw something through the nearest window.) And that differential is, in all modesty, entirely due to the fact that the other novelists got their agents and sold their first books more than 15 years ago, and I more recently.

The industry has DEFINITELY changed, and don’t let anybody, no matter how well-known or powerful, tell you it hasn’t.

Which is a pretty good reason to keep going to writers’ conferences, actually: what sold 15 years ago, or 5, or even 1, is not necessarily what is selling today. Things change (A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, anyone?), and even though, yes, it is often kind of annoying to listen to agents and editors spout the same old platitudes about how good writing always finds a home and indignantly deny that editors don’t edit anymore, they ARE working in the industry right now and DO know what is and isn’t hot. So it’s as good an idea to consult their expertise from time to time as it is to read Publisher’s Marketplace to see who is buying what.

Although I can’t resist sharing one particularly funny quip: in the midst of said requisite indignant speech about how editors at the major houses do so edit still, the editor – unusual for her ilk – actually offered a bit of proof to back up her statement. “I write a four-page memo on every book,” she said, evidently expecting us all to be blown away by that level of feedback.

Now, four pages of feedback (and editorial memos are generally in correspondence format, and thus single-spaced) are certainly not insubstantial, by any means, even when it probably does not mean any line editing at all. Truth compels me to say, however, that by editing standards in the freelance world, it is a tad on the scant side: it’s not all that unusual for me to write 4 pages of feedback on a CHAPTER. And the editor-who-shall-remain-nameless-here-until-she-makes-an-offer wrote two on my novel, a book that she has not yet bought.

Once again, a translation problem, an expectations gap between what writers think the industry should provide and what people in the industry actually do.

So there is another good reason to do a little continuing ed from time to time: the more you know about the industry, the funnier some of these throw-away lines become. Also, while I believe that talent is inherent, writing is a business, and craft is an array of skills – two of the three, then, can be learned, and what can be learned can be polished up.

I have to say, at my point in the writing game, the benefit I derive from attending craft classes is often from the throwaway lines, rather than the main thrust of the courses themselves. But still, a useful insight is a useful insight. For instance, yesterday Robert Levinson suggested that one way to make a plot compelling is to place your protagonist in a situation in which the reader may have fantasized being, and thus allow the reader to live vicariously something he has always wanted to do.

Now, the operative word here is HE, my professional antennae tell me – Mssr. Levinson does, after all, write in a genre with a heavy male readership, which is in itself unusual for fiction. But since his first book was about an imagined affair between Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe (they were on the 20th Century Fox lot at the same time – although, since she was both starring in and producing BUS STOP at that particular point, I don’t know when she would have had the time), I suspect the gentleman knows just a BIT about dealing with his readers’ fantasy lives. I suspect, in turn, that it’s a pretty good piece of advice.

I might actually use that tip in my current novel revision. Which would alone have justified the price of admission, if I hadn’t been scheduled to teach down the hall.

I could go on and on about what people are learning here, but I should scoot off to another seminar. Details follow later, of course. I’m taking good notes for all of you.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Assumptions, assumptions, part III: editorial suggestions

Assumptions, assumptions, part III: editorial suggestions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on - No Comments on Assumptions, assumptions, part II: the importance of packaging

Assumptions, assumptions, part II: the importance of packaging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on - 7 Comments on Assumptions, assumptions

Assumptions, assumptions

Remember how I told you that it is ALWAYS a strategic mistake assume that the readers of your queries and submissions know ANYTHING about the subject matter of your book prior to reading your work? No? Well, allow me to refresh your memory.

As I pointed out in my August series on manuscript revision with an eye to how an agency screener tends to read, authorial assumptions of readerly understanding can water down the intended impact of a manuscript. Obviously, this is true when the assumptions in question are inherently offensive to the reader — stereotyping, for instance, has taken down many a promising submission — but it is also the case where the text proceeds on the assumption that the reader has certain specialized knowledge of the underlying subject matter of the book.

In other words: it’s never a good idea to assume that an agent, screener, or even lay reader has ANY background that would free you from the necessity of explanation. (True of editors, too. But of that, more later, when I get to the part about ME, ME, ME.) Again, the question recurs: how sure are you about who will be reading YOUR submission?

You cannot always rely upon an agent’s background knowledge — even, amazingly enough, when the phenomenon in question is fairly well known. Just as you can’t get away with presuming that any given reader (again, read: agent, editor, or contest judge) will share your political or social beliefs, you cannot legitimately assume that the agent you covet WASN’T brought up in a cardboard box at the base of a mineshaft in an unusually warm part of Antarctica.

So while it’s already a poor idea to include too many pop culture references because they date your book, it’s also not strategically wise because your reader may not recognize them.

Partially, it’s a poor idea because you can’t be sure that the person reading your manuscript will be in your age group (or ethnic group, or sex group — that sounds racier than it is, doesn’t it? — or bridge club, for that matter). Your submission may as easily be read by a 23-year-old recent Columbia graduate with a nose piercing, eight tattoos, and an immoderate admiration for Benito Mussolini as by a 50-year-old Democrat in Armani.

At many agencies, in fact, the screening process would entail your work being approved by both. (In case you’re not aware of it, at a major agency, the agent herself is almost NEVER the first person to read a submission. Yes, even if she requested it from someone she met at a conference. It’s not at all uncommon for a manuscript to need to garner two or even three positive reviews from the screening pool before landing on the agent’s desk.)

Obviously, then, it would not be the best strategic move to make your work inaccessible to a reader outside your own age group — yes, even if you are writing a book SPECIFICALLY for readers in your age group. Screeners and editorial assistants tend to be young, so they might well need an explanation of, say, the quotidian effects of menopause.

How young, you ask? I don’t mean to scare those of you on Social Security, but practically the only editorial feedback I received on my memoir from the callow stripling assigned to it by my publishing house was flagged cultural references. The two that stick in my mind: next to Dacron, he had scrawled, “What is this?” and next to Aristotle, he had written, “Who?”

I’m just saying.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but for the benefit of those of you new to this blog, allow me to emphasize that age assumptions can be especially disastrous in contest entries: I can’t tell you how many entries I’ve screened as a judge that automatically assumed that every reader would be a Baby Boomer, with that set of life experiences. As a Gen Xer with parents born long before the Baby Boom (my father had first-hand memories of hometown doughboys marching off to World War I; my mother’s elementary school best friend was carted off to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II), I obviously read these entries differently than an older (or younger) person would.

More to the point, as would a judge in her late 60s — or 70s, or 80s, as often they are. Being a contest judge takes TIME, especially for those stalwart souls who are first round readers. They need to be able to read and comment upon dozens of entries within a short window of time, so contest judges tend to be either extraordinarily dedicated volunteers who are willing to forego sleep in order to help out, people like me who have extremely flexible schedules, or —  and this is far and away the largest potential group of volunteers — retired people.

Thus, like the Academy Awards, the average age of a first-round contest judge tends to fall in the charmingly graying range. Which — I hate to say it, but it’s often true — tends to place those who write for Gen Xers or Gen Yers at a competitive disadvantage in the average contest. Yet another reason it’s a pretty good idea to make sure that any piece you enter would read well for ANY English-reading demographic.

Just as with your submissions to agencies, you never know how old your readers will be.

Ditto for concepts, cultural phenomena, professions, etc. — and ditto fifty times over for phenomena that do not routinely occur on the Eastern seaboard. Many things are beyond the average Manhattanite’s ken. So if your protagonist is an Alaskan fisherwoman, it’s probably a fairly safe bet that an agent in NYC will have little to no idea what such a person’s day-to-day life would entail, other than that there is probably a boat involved. Possibly a net as well.

However, it’s not always as simple as that: for all you know, the agent of your dreams’ older brother spent half a decade on just such a fishing boat (it was right after our Jimmy ran off to follow the Grateful Dead for a couple of years, but the family doesn’t talk about that, unless someone asks about his missing pinkie finger.) And, wouldn’t you know it, Jimmy was an unusually prolific writer of letters home. While he was on the high seas, he was clinging to a miniscule desk below deck, scribbling away like Mme. de Staël, giving your agent a crash course in all things fishery.

And this presents a genuine dilemma for the writer, doesn’t it? You have to be prepared for both complete ignorance and intimate familiarity with your subject matter. The trouble is, of course, is that before you submit, you have absolutely no idea which.

In order to succeed in this business, of course, you will need to accept that you cannot control who will read your work after you mail it to an agency. If your romance novel about cruise line captain happens to fall onto the desk of someone who has recently experienced food poisoning mid-cruise (just before the mambo tournament, too!) and resented it, there’s really nothing you can do to assuage her dislike. Similarly, if your self-help book on resolving intrafamily discord is screened by a reader in the midst of a three-year fight with her siblings over Grandma’s estate (she promised the figurines to everybody, apparently), no efforts on your part can assure a non-cynical read. And, as long-term readers of this blog already know, a tongue just burned on a latté often spells disaster for the next manuscript its owner reads.

All you can do is concentrate on what you can control: clarity, aptness of references, and making your story or argument appeal to as broad an audience as possible.

That being said, I have another truth to spring on you, so brace yourselves: everything I have just told you about dealing with agencies and contests is roughly 47 times more pertinent — and more important — when dealing with an editor at a publishing house. But of that (ME, ME, ME!), more tomorrow.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 7 Comments on The best birthday present EVER

The best birthday present EVER

Today is my birthday, and I have been holding off on sharing some exceptionally good news for the past few days, so I could announce it today.

Remember yesterday, when I mentioned the industry’s patented last-minute revision deadlines? And remember how I told you in the dim past that editors almost never ask authors to revise and resubmit anymore? Well…

A major publishing house has asked me to make certain revisions in my novel, THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB. It’s not an offer yet, mind you, but it’s the first step.

Not a bad birthday present, is it?

To add icing to the birthday cake, the editor — it practically makes me tear up even to write about it, because it’s SO uncommon — took the time to read my manuscript TWICE before she made any suggestions at all. And the requested changes, while not what I would have chosen to do left to my own devices, are all quite reasonable and doable.

Yes, that’s right — she gave me THOUGHTFUL feedback. I know; pinch me, because this seldom happens to writers outside dreams.

I am both tickled the proverbial pink and a bit panicked, of course: said revisions need to be done in about a month. (See earlier comment about deadlines.) So you may safely expect two things between now and Halloween: my blogs will probably be a tad shorter, on average, and I will have a LOT to say about the art of revision.

But wait! There’s more!

I have a birthday present for you, my loyal readers: as of today, every single blog I have ever written is now available on this site, all the way back to my first PNWA post in August, 2005. And, unlike my old PNWA blog, these are both arranged by category, so you may quickly find the general area you need in a crisis, AND you can comment upon them. (The fact that my readers could not leave comments on my old blog was a source of constant debate; suffice it to say that it wasn’t my idea.)

That’s 1567 pages (in standard format, of course) of bloggy goodness for you, roughly 391,750 words. (If you don’t know how I was able to translate from one to the other, go back and read the earlier blogs on word count. See how easy it is?)

Why am I giving you a present for my birthday? Well, this is a major birthday for me, my friends, not only due to the Best Birthday Present Ever, but because my birthday last year was marked by a singularly unpleasant event: it was the day that my publisher first mentioned the possibility of canceling my contract for my memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK.

Yes, my agent felt bad about the timing, too.

As you may have noticed, the book is not yet out, nor can I tell you when it will be, due to repeated groundless lawsuit threats from the Dick estate. Since they first began threatening, they have never specified anything that they wanted changed in the actual text of the book (the closest they came to specificity was objecting to the photo used on the cover, which was naturally beyond my control), there was no way to revise the text in order to appease them. Evidently, they believed that the mere fact that I, of all the writers in the world, had written a book about my relationship with Philip was in itself actionable.

It’s not, as far as I know, but these folks have a LOT of money.

This state of affairs has prevailed since mid-July, 2005, shortly before I began writing the PNWA Resident Writer blog. There have been days when literally the only positive thing that happened was that I sat down and posted advice here that might help other writers. The blog has been absolutely essential to keeping me sane and balanced throughout this ordeal — and for that, I thank you, my readers, from the bottom of my heart.

Unfortunately, I can give you no update on the publication prospects of my memoir: my publisher has in fact reached a decision about it, but until the legalities are settled, I cannot fill you in on what happened and why. Many, many thanks to those of you who preordered the book, and I hope some day, I can publish the truth as I know it.

I can’t worry about that now, however: I have a revision to perform. And a birthday to celebrate.

I feel pretty good about my life, all in all. Whenever my faith starts to waver, I remind myself of Louisa May Alcott, who struggled for seventeen years before she got her big break.

Louisa should be the patron saint of writerly persistence. She wrote every day, mostly for ill-paying newspapers, primarily under pseudonyms, because she needed the money to support her shabby genteel family. Her first two books were, to put it kindly, great big flops, and she flailed about from genre to genre, trying to find her market. In a rejection letter, a publisher who declined her romance novel (which was, incidentally, quite good) mentioned that they would be willing to take a look at a book for girls. Louisa, by her own admission, didn’t much like girls, but as a writing professional, she gave it the old college try.

LITTLE WOMEN has never been out of print since. In the midst of her struggle to find her voice, she wrote, “I shall make a battering-ram of my head, and make my way through this rough-and-tumble world.”

May we all have her tenacity and permanent in-print status, my friends — although perhaps with swifter guardian angels, ones willing to whisper in the ears of the small army of people who need to approve each acquisition: “Buy this book. You need this book. The world needs this book.”

But while our angels are in training, let’s all keep up the good work.

Posted on - 8 Comments on Agencies and AGENCIES

Agencies and AGENCIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on - 5 Comments on Titles that are, um, catchy

Titles that are, um, catchy

Yesterday, I started to answer a multi-part question from loyal reader and excellent question-asker MooCrazy, but I ran out of time before I could get to one of its constituent parts. To wit: “Anne – Would you please address the topics of 1) choosing a title before querying..?” Today, I would like to tackle this good question, and the issue of title malleability in general, at my characteristic great length.

As anyone in the industry will tell you, a good, eye-catching title can be a real selling point for a book. Rather like a Hollywood hook in a verbal pitch, it can grab the query-reader’s attention memorably in a very short space of time. Not to mention the fact that an interesting title indicates the author’s inherent creativity far better than, “I hope you will be interested in my as-yet-unnamed novel…”

Someone might mention the latter point to the fine people who title movies for a living. Stealing the title of a pop song from thirty years ago (I’m looking at YOU, PRETTY WOMAN) doesn’t exactly scream out Macarthur genius-grant levels of creativity, does it?

There are plenty of formulae out there for constructing a good title — gerund + name, as in JUDGING AMY (or CHASING AMY, come to think of it) has been popular for far too long, in my opinion — but to be absolutely honest with you, this is yet another of those areas where most industry insiders cannot give you any clearer direction than anyone you might meet browsing in your neighborhood bookstore. Like the famous Supreme Court dictum about pornography, almost no one in the industry can define precisely what a good title is, but they all know it when they see it.

Personally, I favor arresting titles over merely descriptive ones or puns: given the choice amongst Bob Tarte’s titles, for instance, I would go for ENSLAVED BY DUCKS over FOWL WEATHER every time. Why? Well, I dare you: just try to forget ENSLAVED BY DUCKS.

In fact, an excellent test of a good title is to tell it (ONCE) to a non-literary friend, then ask her to repeat it back to you an hour later. Better still, tell her all of the titles you have brainstormed for your book, and see which she remembers an hour later. Because — and this is a HUGE difference between how writers think of titles and how the rest of the industry does — from an agent or editor’s point of view, THE TITLE’S PURPOSE IS MARKETING, NOT BOOK DESCRIPTION.

Pause for a moment and let that one sink in. In the minds of the industry, the title exists solely to cajole readers into buying it. I hate to be the one to break this to you, but they don’t consider naming a book an art.

So the more memorable your working title, the better. If you can work an apparent paradox into your title, for instance, it is more likely to be remembered. THE POISONWOOD BIBLE is catchy, because of the contrast between a scary word (poison) and a comforting one (Bible); THE MALTESE FALCON, by contrast, is merely descriptive — something you would remember about the plot after you read the book, certainly, but not an arresting enough image to make you snatch the book from a shelf.

I know it’s counter-intuitive to think of a title as external to the book, but when you’re querying, marketing your book needs to be your top priority, alas. A title that requires further explanation, as most that are content-specific do, will probably not catch an agent’s eye as well as one that does not. Thus, while CATCH-22 is actually an extraordinarily apt title for the novel — the concept repeated at least a hundred times throughout the course of the book — in order to query the book in the current publisher’s market, you would have to EXPLAIN what a Catch-22 was before the title seemed apt. And poof! There goes a paragraph of your query letter.

In fact, now that I come to think about it, I notice that every single one of that list I have run before, the five immense bestsellers that were each rejected by many, many publishers before finding a home, all had titles that required further explanation! Lookee:

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)

You can just hear an agency screener muttering, “Who the heck is Auntie Mame?” can’t you?

So if you go for a descriptive title, make sure it conjures up some pretty powerful mental images in the observer. You might not know instantly from the title what SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS was about, but it evokes a lovely mental picture, doesn’t it?

Inserting a strong image also hedges your bets. If you go for image, rather than just the rhythm of the words, you can sometimes make your book stick in the head of an agent or editor who does not remember the title per se: not everyone necessarily remembers the entirety of the title of my novel, THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB, as such, but trust me, they do remember that both a Buddha and water are involved.

All that being said, as most authors who have seen a first book of theirs go through the wringer of a publishing house know to their sorry, the title the author picks at the manuscript stage is almost NEVER the title that ends up on the published book. Often, an agent will switch a title to something more likely to catch a particular editor’s eye, but in general, it is the publishing house’s marketing department who gets to title the book — and if that happens, the author is usually contractually barred from changing it back.

Sorry to be the one to tell you that.

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. Knowing this in advance can help you keep your equilibrium when the inevitable happens, and not fall so in love with your title that it’s a deal-breaker.

Allow me to share my own tale of woe on the subject. As a freelance editor and friend of literally hundreds of aspiring writers, I have held more than my share of weeping authors’ hands in the aftermath of their titles being ruthlessly changed, so although I was fond of the original title of my memoir — IS THAT YOU, PUMPKIN?, I certainly did not expect it to stick. I knew that my title likely 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, in short, to be spectacularly reasonable.

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

So how did I end up with a title I positively hated? Well, my memoir is about my relationship with science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, and at two distinct points, my publisher planned to release my book to coincide with the filmed version of one of his books, A SCANNER DARKLY. The instant that decision was made, my fate was sealed: the marketing department decided within the course of a single closed-door meeting to change the title of my book to A FAMILY DARKLY, presumably to make it reminiscent of the movie.

“Interesting,” I said cautiously when my editor first told me that my baby had been rechristened while I had been looking the other way. “Um, do you mind if I ask what A FAMILY DARKLY means? Yes, it deals with dark issues, but it’s a funny book. And, if you don’t mind my mentioning it, an adverb can’t be used to modify a noun.”

My editor was unsympathetic to my concerns. “It was the marketing department’s idea. They think it’s, um, catchy.”

The succeeding scintillating discussion on matters logical and grammatical lasted over six months — and no, I still haven’t found out what the title 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. Even after the movie had been released, and the book still had not, I was stuck with a title that I could not possibly justify if somebody asked me about it at a book reading.

And at no point in the process did anyone affiliated with the process every give even passing consideration to what I think would be ANY author’s main complaint in the situation: the title had nothing to do with the content of the book. The marketing department would never know that, however, because to the best of my knowledge (avert your eyes, if you are easily shocked), no one involved in the titling decision ever read so much as a page of the book.

Welcome to the big leagues, boys and girls.

“Why,” I hear my generous and empathetic readers asking, bless them, “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 heavenward repeatedly after their titles were summarily changed by their publishers. I believe that the answer lies in the field of psychology, rather than marketing. 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 without overt protest: 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.

In other words: 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? And didn’t you wonder why I had such a weird title for my memoir?) 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 my ostensible handicap of postgraduate degrees.

Let me tell you, 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: an author who doesn’t like the title imposed upon her book is an uncooperative, unrealistic, market-ignorant mule to her publishers, and a self-centered, quibbling deal-blower to her friends. All anyone can agree about is that she is ungrateful beyond human example. Sorry about that.

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. At the querying stage, pick an eye-catching title, but try not to fall too in love with it. Maybe you should hold your actual favorite in reserve, for the inevitable discussion with the marketing folks, when they ask you in belligerent tones, “Well, do you have a better idea?”

Something tells me that you do — but don’t worry; I won’t say a word about it to your prospective publishers. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Housekeeping

Housekeeping

All right, I am substantially less grumpy today, due in large part to memoir-related negotiations that I am not, as usual, at liberty to discuss. Here’s a hint, though: by mid-October, I may be able to tell you the ENTIRE story about why the book hasn’t come out yet, in vivid Technicolor.

In the meantime, I have some housekeeping to do today: my desktop is piled high with unanswered questions from readers (well, my virtual desktop is, anyway), all of which richly deserve answers. Practical questions, too, the kind that everyone wants answered. For instance, clever and insightful reader Claire wrote to ask:

“Suppose an agent wants to see your whole manuscript. Does one send it in a box? With enough postage inside for them to return it? How does the whole SASE thing work for an entire manuscript? Thanks.”

Claire, thanks for asking this: I can’t tell you how many last-minute, panicked phone calls and e-mails I’ve gotten on this very point – I think perhaps the writers in question just start looking up freelance editors on line while they’re about to rush off to the post office, and call every phone number until they catch someone who knows.

The answer is no, not anymore. In the old days – say, 30+ years ago – the author was expected to provide a box, and a rather nice one, then wrap it in plain brown paper for shipping. These old boxes are beautiful, if you can still find one: dignified black cardboard, held together by shining brass brads.

So if you can get it there in one piece box-free (say, if it is short enough to fit into a Priority Mail cardboard envelope), go ahead. Remember, though, that you want to have your pages arrive looking fresh and unbent, so make sure that your manuscript fits comfortably in its holder in such a way that the pages are unlikely to wrinkle.

If not, find an inexpensive box – if you live in the greater Seattle area, Archie McPhee’s, of all places, routinely carries fabulous red and blue boxes exactly the right size for a 450-page manuscript WITH adorable little black plastic handles for about a buck each. The craft chain store Michael’s also carries a box with the right footprint to ship a manuscript without too much internal shifting, as do some office supply stories. However, these boxes are generally a tad on the expensive side, and they are often too deep for the average manuscript, so you will need to add some bubble wrap or other filler. (Avoid the temptation to use newspaper; newsprint stains.)

But whatever you do, don’t reuse a box clearly marked for some other purpose, such as holding dishwashing soap. (Yes, it’s been known to happen.)

Include a return mailing label, already made out to you, the proper stamps for postage (metered strips will not work here), and add a paragraph to your cover letter explaining that you want them to reuse the box. To be on the safe side, explain HOW you want them to reuse the box: peel the back off the mailing label, stick it over the old label, affix new postage, and seal. (Trust me, sometimes they have trouble figuring it out.)

My preferred method is to use one of those free Priority Mail boxes that the post office provides, the ones that are about 2 inches deep. They’ll actually hold two 400-page manuscripts side-by-side quite comfortably, so I usually add padding to keep the unbound manuscript (for those of you who don’t know: never bind a manuscript in any way) from bouncing around too much. I want it to look good when it gets there, after all.

Since it would be impracticable to fold up another Priority Mail box inside, I either enclose the label and postage, as I described above, or, if I really don’t think that I’m going to be getting it back anytime soon, just nab one of those tough little everything-you-can-cram-in-here-is-one-price Priority Mail envelopes, self-address it, add postage, and stick it into the box. If you don’t care if your manuscript comes back to you a little bent, this is a wonderfully cash-conscious way to go. Those envelopes are surprisingly tough, in my experience — what are they made out of, kryptonite? — and while the pages don’t look too pretty after a cross-country trip in them, they do tend to arrive safely.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m not a big fan of writers over-investing in impressive return postage. If you’re getting the manuscript back, it’s because they’ve rejected it, right? Who cares if the pages show up on your doorstep bent?

My, that was a long answer to a simple question, wasn’t it? On to the next, which is actually two in one:

“Anne – Would you please address the topics of 1) choosing a title before querying and 2) the role of a web site, not only to promote a current book but to sell the next one (if, indeed it is of any use in selling the next one). I sure would appreciate it.
Thanks, MooCrazy”

Happy to, Moo – but as I have a LOT to say on the issue of titles, pray forgive me if I take your second question first, and delay the first until tomorrow. (If you reread that question four or six more times, you will find that it honestly does make sense, I promise.)

Pretty much anyone in the industry will tell an aspiring writer to set up a website for herself and her book before the ink is dry on the publication contract, but in my experience, not everyone who gives this advice is entirely clear WHY it is a good idea. Amongst the computer-illiterate (a group to which a surprisingly high percentage of inmates of publishing houses and agencies seem to belong), it is not uncommon to regard websites as magical attractors of customers for any business. These are, lest we forget, the people who actually believed it when Internet-promoters predicted ten years ago that supermarkets, shoe stores, and other in-person buying experiences would be wiped out forever by online purchasing.

The industry’s thinking about the web has not, alas, changed much in the intervening decade. Oh, they know now that bloggers exist — at least, they know about the bloggers who get millions of hits daily — but as the regular blog readers among you have probably already noticed, they haven’t seemed to have been able to figure out that a blog’s readership will have ALREADY read the entries on the blog; when they buy a book by a blogger whose work they have followed for some time, they want to see something NEW.

But I digress. My point is, publishers tell writers to set up websites, and sometimes even do it for them, and admittedly, it is a fine thing if a potential book buyer who has heard your name elsewhere can run a basic internet search on your name and find information on your book. However, the resulting websites tend to be tombstones. They are static; since the content never changes, except perhaps to note different dates on a book tour, there’s no reason for your potential readers ever to go there more than once.

Perhaps as a blogger, I am prejudiced, but I think this is an inefficient use of a website. It’s basically just a roadside sign along a very busy, very advertisement-heavy highway. Yes, someone may see it, but there’s a whole lot of competition to wade through first.

The big search engines reward websites whose content changes often — that’s why blogs tend to shoot up the Google lists. (Also, the more content you have to be indexed, the more different kinds of searches will lead to your website.) So if you’re going to invest in a website, and you want to have it be an effective promotional tool, it’s a good idea to plan in advance to make the time to change the content often.

Have you considered writing a blog, for instance?

Don’t get me wrong – like any other kind of advertising, it’s generally better to have a website than not to have one. It is genuinely nice if people who have fallen in love with your first book have a logical place to check in to see when your second is coming out. There is nothing to stop you, either, from creating a “Join my mailing list” button on your website, to make it easier for you to send out e-mails to your fans when there is breaking news about your next book.

However, in my experience with the industry, there is one thing that a blog will NEVER do for an author: be a substitute for submission pages. Counterintuitive, isn’t it, when agents and editors keep yammering about how authors should have blogs? I have heard agents complain ENDLESSLY about writers who include web addresses in their query letters, expecting the agents to make the time to log on and check out their prose there. “Like I have the time to search for the work of someone I don’t know,” they scoff.

Unless you are already a well-established blogger – and sometimes not even then – it just doesn’t work.

By all means, though, if you are marketing a book to agents and editors, mention that you have a website, if you do; in their minds, it will mean that you are serious about helping promote your book. If you are submitting a nonfiction book proposal, definitely mention that erecting a website is part of your promotion plan.

“Wait a minute!” I hear some of the craftier of you out there cry. “If they never check submitters’ websites, why shouldn’t I just go ahead and SAY I already have a website, if it’s a selling point?

For the sake of your karma, for one thing. Or immortal soul, if you prefer to think of it that way. Or just because it’s not very nice to lie to people. And maybe, just maybe, yours would be the one time in the last fifteen years an agent actually did take the time to take a gander at a writer’s website.

I hope that answers your questions, Moo and Claire. The other part of Moo’s question follows tomorrow. In the meantime, keep those good questions rolling in, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Expanding your query list, Part VIII: Surfing the sea of reviews

Expanding your query list, Part VIII: Surfing the sea of reviews

Before I launch into today’s installment, I feel the need to pause a moment and gloat: today, the Spanish government began to enforce a law that stipulates models must be over certain specified Body Mass Indexes. In plain English, they turned away about 30% of the models who showed up for work today, because they weighed too little, and I have been deriving real enjoyment from watching the size 0s and 2s on television prattle on sanctimoniously about how awful it is that 15-year-old models choose to starve themselves.

Because, as we all know, early adolescents set all the rules in any society. Where on EARTH did those women, the talking heads cry, get the idea that they needed to be skeletal in order to get work as models or actresses? And why in heaven’s name do young girls look up to models as standards of beauty? Clearly, something very strange indeed has been going on behind adult backs, to set up goals of comeliness so diametrically opposed to those embraced by those of us old enough to vote, edit fashion magazines, or cast movies.

I learned today, from one of those size 2 talking heads, that the average NYC model is 6 feet tall and weighs 117 pounds, apparently the twin sister of that 98-pound weakling who used to get sand kicked in his face by the muscle men in the old cartoons. The purpose of all that sand-kicking, of course, was to steal the willowy beauty of their day. And what did she look like? Allow me to quote from a 1949 book on women in the workforce: “Fashion models must be 5’6” to 5’10” (with heels) and wear a size 12 or 14. The model has to draw a fine line between going to enough parties to be seen regularly and getting enough sleep to appear always fresh and clear-eyed for work.”

Not to mention financing that speed habit. Somewhere up in that great pink boudoir in the sky, I sincerely hope Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, and Jayne Mansfield are having a good, hearty belly laugh at us all right now. And then eating vats upon vats of ice cream.

All right, I am descending from my soapbox now; back to business. 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 or background resembles yours in some important respect. Today, I am going to discuss an inexpensive and highly effective way to identify agents with a solid recent track record of selling books in your area: reading book reviews.

“Wait just a model-starving second!” I hear those of you who have been paying attention to this series cry. “Wouldn’t books coming out right now necessarily be a reflection of what agents were selling at least a year ago? What about your passionate diatribe yesterday about how agents live in the now, so we should strive to be as up-to-the-minute in our research as possible?”

If you thought this, or some reasonable facsimile of it, you get a gold star for the day. Chant it with me now: from the time a book is purchased by a publisher to the date it appears in bookstores is at least a year. Sometimes longer. And publishing trends, like an aspiring model’s weight, can fluctuate wildly over a much shorter period of time: the same agents who were clamoring a year ago for memoirs like A MILLION LITTLE PIECES are now telling writers that memoir simply doesn’t sell. The agents who were combing conferences for the next SEX IN THE CITY two years ago are now insisting that chick lit is doomed.

And, of course, six months from now, after everyone has calmed down after the Random House class action settlement with James Frey’s pre-scandal readers (payments underwritten, one suspects, by the hugely increased sales of the book AFTER the scandal broke), some other book category will be pronounced permanently dead, too. Since it takes substantially longer to write a book than for a bunch of people in Manhattan to decide what the next hot thing will be, all we writers can do is monitor the squalls from afar and hope we’re ready when our time comes.

However, keeping up-to-the-minute on who is selling what NOW pretty much requires subscribing to one of the rather expensive industry publications, such as Publishers Marketplace or Publishers Weekly. As a dispenser of free advice myself, I am very much in favor of highlighting any free resources that are available to writers. Most aspiring writers are already struggling to make time to write, and for those with the spare cash to spend, there is a whole industry devoted to producing seminars, conferences, books, and magazines devoted to helping them become better and more publishable writers. So if I can save my readers a few shekels from time to time, I like to do it.

The book review method is undoubtedly cheap: if you go to a public library, you don’t even have to buy newspapers or magazines 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 Part IV of this series — which occasionally do), reading the reviews will enable you to single out writers who are either writing for the same micro-niche you are 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. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a bound galley is a low-cost print of a book cheaply packaged, without a hard cover, for circulation to reviewers. They look a little bit like thick scripts for plays.) Talk to anyone who works at a large-circulation magazine, and they will tell you: they receive hundreds of bound galleys every month, but unlike an industry publication like LIBRARY JOURNAL, they simply do not have room to review them all.

They review perhaps a dozen per month, out of all those submissions. And to narrow the probability of any given book’s being reviewed even more, most print media outlets have a policy to review only books released in hardcover — although since it has gotten so common to release fiction in trade paper, you’re starting to see some shift on the subject — and only books released through traditional publishing. Self-published and electronic books are almost impossible to get reviewed, alas, unless you’re Stephen King.

Thus, if you see a book reviewed in a major publication, it is because it is either 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 or the author’s press people) has been a shameless nagger. Since even a poor review in a major publication will equal more book sales than no review at all (remember when John Irving’s last book got savaged by THE WASHINGTON POST?), 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.

Querying authors whose books get reviewed is good place to start looking for such an agent, obviously.

Tomorrow, I shall wrap up this series on agent-spotting, so we may move on to other pastures. But before I go, I have a question to toss out there, for future posts: have you been hearing industry terminology used at conferences, or seeing in writer-targeted publications, or even found me using here, that you would like to see defined with some precision?

If so, please send them to me via the COMMENTS function, below, so I know to include them in my upcoming glossary of industry-speak. Since I hope that this fall’s querying blitz is going to bring many of you into contact with agents and editors eager to help you promote your writing, I thought it might be a good idea to give you a crash course in the language they will be speaking.

Keep up the good work!