A few words on feedback, part XI, in which I finally stop yammering on the subject and move on

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Welcome to what I devoutly hope will be my last post for a while on strategies writers can use to wrest good feedback from their first readers. Last time — and probably a few times before, knowing me — I brought up the deer-in-the-headlights look that first readers often exhibit when asked post-read for commentary both more complex and more potentially usable than Oh, yeah, I liked it.

One would think that they might have at least suspected that some follow-up questions would be forthcoming, but I have it on good authority, through the excellent medium of listening to writers complain lustily about it for many years straight, that it isn’t always the case. Why, only a few days ago, intrepid reader Nadine posted an interesting observation about this phenomenon, in case you missed it.)

For the past few days, I’ve been talking about steps a writer can take to minimize the possibility of finding herself post-read without reader feedback that can be incorporated in the next draft. Today, I want to turn the question around, to discuss why intelligent, articulate first readers so often have this reaction.

Even when they loved the book. Strange but true.

In practice, first readers new to feedback-giving almost always experience some difficulty giving specific feedback. Oh, they may not say so point-blank, but you may notice them freaking out a little if they are asked pointed questions, as if the author had abruptly transformed into an IRS agent conducting a five-year audit.

If you doubt the pervasiveness of this reaction, you might want to spend a little more time at author readings. Audience members frequently freeze up if the author of a published book responds to their praise (or, heaven forefend, to a simple request to autograph the book) with, “Thanks — what was your favorite part?”

Note to self: don’t do this at future readings.

I don’t think that this reaction is due to a pervasive public perception that authors are godlike beings before whom the average reader should quail. (As much as some of us might like that to be the case.) No, ask for a detailed analysis of pretty much any written material, and most readers will suddenly find it difficult to breathe.

Even — and I find this fascinating — people who habitually recommend books to their friends will often balk if put on the spot.

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.

Poor souls, when an author asks their opinion of his book, they think they’re being asked IF they liked it, not why. If they didn’t know that they would be expected to cough up a more detailed response — usually why a writer seeking feedback asks first readers to start turning pages in the first place, right? — they tend to feel as defensive as if the author told them their opinion was wrong.

As if the author above had said to them, “You actually LIKED that trash? In heaven’s name, why?” rather than, “Please tell me what I did right in this book, so I may cater to that taste in my next, the one that my agent is breathing down my neck to produce while I’m on this book tour,” or even, “I am a seething mass of insecurities; please reassure me.”

What we have here, in short, is a failure to communicate.

Now do you understand why I’ve been so insistent about giving your first readers a study guide, so they’ll {know} what’s going to be on the test and can prepare accordingly? It’s the best way I know to bridge the communication gap and nip this common anxiety in the bud.

I’m not just saying this because I was the prof who habitually stopped mid-lecture to announce, “Gee, wouldn’t THAT make a fabulous final exam question? Let me repeat it a couple of times, so you can write it down.” (And yes, my department did hate that I did it; thanks for asking.) From the unprepared reader’s POV, being grilled by an anxious author is like a pop quiz on material read for fun.

They tense up because it’s not fair, strictly speaking.

Writers are far less likely to have this response, of course, for obvious reasons: usually, we were the folks who ruined the grade curve in English class. Hand us an essay question about a book we like (or hate), and we’ll go on for hours, won’t we?

But just for a moment, let’s try to identify with the vast majority of the population that does not instinctively respond with joy to being asked to produce a book report on the spot.

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?

How about 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. “What if I accidentally cite a DC Comic instead? Will I lose points?”

I like to call this the what color am I thinking? school of test-construction, because it requires the students to guess, with virtually no guidance, what the teacher wants to see in the essay. Short of sophisticated telepathy, how on earth is the student supposed to know what criteria will be used to judge her response?

We’ve all had teachers who put us in this uncomfortable position, right? 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. Because I value your time and my page space, I shall not reproduce one of her opus here, but trust me, those questions were epic.

My high school biology teacher, even 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.”

Half of my classmates instinctively clutched their chests, anticipating a heart attack. Did Mr. Young intend this as an invitation to draw lilies for an hour, an instruction to reproduce the entirety of The Origin of Species, or an entreaty to write haiku? No one knew until after the exams were graded.

Are these examples dredging up your long-buried responses to the kinds of exams that drove you nuts in school? Got that I-can’t-believe-this-is-really-happening feeling firmly in mind?

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, I would implore you to visit the FORMATTING MANUSCRIPTS and/or STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED categories at right with all possible speed), 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 have an ego the size of New Zealand, are being paid to do it, or both. Even then, it’s intimidating at first, but there are compensations.

If it’s any consolation for those of you who were told that your English degrees had no use in the real world, 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.

If you are using folks without either of those advantages as first readers, 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.

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. Even if you are not prey to nagging doubts about the quality of your writing in the dead of night — if you are, trust me, you are far from alone — I can virtually guarantee that at some point along even the most bump-free road to publication, you will appreciate having some concrete reasons to feel good about your book.

In case any of you had heard otherwise, very little about the publication process is designed to {reduce} a writer’s insecurities. Yet another reason that a good fit with one’s agent is a positive boon to an author: who better to reassure you about your inherent talent, worth as a human being, and general fabulousness while your book is making the rounds of editors?

But I digress, don’t I?

In your list of feedback criteria, 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? If you would appreciate references to specific page numbers (trust me: you do), either ask your reader to keep a list of ‘em or provide some sort of easily-attached tape flags.

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 those of you who haunt critique groups have started to wonder if coming up with such a list for fellow members wouldn’t be such a terrible idea prior to exchanging manuscripts, give yourself a gold star for the day.

It’s a good idea to tell your reader up front HOW you would like to receive feedback, too. It honestly isn’t self-evident. In the margins? On a separate piece of paper? As a bullet list to accompany verbal communication? Remember, the more writing you ask to receive, the more of a time commitment you are requesting, but unless you take shorthand or have a tape recorder always handy (which not all first readers will appreciate; ask), it’s hard to keep in mind everything said within a context of a conversation.

Think VERY carefully whether you really do prefer verbal feedback, though. Receiving critique can be a pretty intense emotional experience; if you don’t think you can keep saying, “Rework the running order completely? Thank you for suggesting that,” for half an hour straight, asking for written feedback may well be a better choice. (As a fringe benefit, it’s also more likely to be detailed.)

Oh, and do remember to mention up front whether you would like the manuscript back after the reader finishes with it; unless you ask for marginalia specifically, most readers will assume that it is theirs to keep — or recycle, as they see fit. If you expect its return and your first reader lives far away, it’s courteous to send along a SASE.

This is especially true if your manuscript is longer than the reader may have expected — just as agents and editors grow a trifle pale when a 600-page manuscript shows up in the mail, amateur readers tend to balk a little when handed a tome heavier than a lhasa apso. More pages equals more of a time commitment. If yours tops the infamous 400-page mark — where most pros would start to get nervous about marketability, incidentally — do tell your first reader that up front.

And finally, at every step throughout the process, observe my final tip: be HUGELY grateful for your first readers’ help — and express that gratitude early and often.

Yes, even if the feedback turns out not to be very helpful. As I keep mentioning, reading a manuscript with an eye to feedback is a far, far different thing than dipping into a book for sheer pleasure, no matter how polished the writing is. It’s hard; it’s merely polite to treat it as the favor it is.

The same holds true when you are the feedback-giver, to a certain extent: the more polite, specific, and clear you can be, the better the experience for everyone concerned.

Which means, of course, that if you find yourself on the receiving end of a manuscript, or in a critique group that does not already have guidelines for feedback established (fie!), it’s perfectly legitimate to ask for guidance BEFORE you begin reading. I’m quite serious about this: both you and the writer will be happier in the long run if you do.

And really, do you want to guess how someone you just met on an online forum or at a writers’ conference prefers to receive feedback? That’s the kind of challenge that can make even the best of readers freeze up.

You don’t want to trigger bad exam flashbacks, do you? Of course not.

As always, keep up the good work!

(PS: the nifty photo of the statue appears courtesy of the fine folks at FreeFoto.com, kindly filling in the gap until my digital camera is fixed.)

A few words on feedback, part VIII: the coffee date you absolutely must keep

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Last time, I stirred up some lovely discussion by taking an in-depth gander at one of the most perplexing of social situations in which a writer may find herself, the friend who asks to read a manuscript — then keeps it forever and a day.

(For those of you joining this series late, I have dubbed the remiss friend who turns your manuscript into a doorstop Gladys, but feel free to give her any face you like. I tremble to think how my readers picture Millicent by this point: the Wicked Witch of the West probably does not even come close. Go ahead and embellish; it’s a healthy way to work out pent-up hostility.)

Admittedly, I may be harping on this theme a little, but I have my reasons: although one occasionally encounters advice in writing manuals about whom to avoid as a feedback giver (it varies, but the universal no-no: spouses, significant others, POSSLQs, and anyone else who has ever spent any time in the writer’s bedroom other than to make the bed), I’ve never seen this problem discussed elsewhere, or heard a brilliant solution posited by a writing guru at a conference.

And this is a shame, I think, because it’s a genuinely difficult situation for the writer, the kind of experience that can make good writers swear off seeking reader feedback forever.

But a writer needs feedback, and not all of us have the luxury of a well-read, genre-appropriate, tact-spewing writers’ group meeting within a couple of miles of our domiciles, or the time to join it if one does exist. So I like to think of this series as a survival manual for trekking through the feedback wilderness.

Advance planning can go a long way toward avoiding a Gladys outcome. Observing some of the earlier tips in this series — especially making sure up front that the reader has time available soon to read your work, ascertaining that your first readers fully understand what you expect them to do, and that it involves significantly more effort than merely reading a book – may cost you a few potential readers, but being scrupulous on these points will both reduce the probability of your being left without usable feedback.

It will also help you hold the moral high ground if your Gladys starts to dither as the weeks pass. And frankly, you’re going to want to cling to the high ground, because some Gladioli have been known, as I mentioned last time, to get a mite defensive when confronted with the fact that they evidently read at the speed of a third grader.

Or, to refine the taunt for those more in the know, the speed of a busy editor at a major publishing house, who frequently take months to get around to a manuscript, simply because they have so many of them on their desks. Or propping up their coffee tables, gracing their couches, providing a papery pedestal that Tom Wolfe book they’ve been meaning to read forever…well, you get the point.

In fact, I suppose that an unusually broad-minded writer could construe the Gladioli of this world as prepping writers for the moment when their agents will say, “I know it’s been five months, but they haven’t gotten to it,” but unless Gladys IS an editor at a major publishing house, an agent, or another stripe of professional editor, she probably isn’t overwhelmed with manuscripts clamoring for her attention.

Enough obsessing about the problem: let’s talk solution. How does one set ground rules for first readers without sounding like a taskmaster to someone who is about to do you a great big favor?

First off, remember that unless she’s a member of your writing group or you’re paying her to do it, Gladys is under no obligation to help you and your book. Treating it like a favor from the get-go can go a long way toward minimizing problems down the line.

So why not take Gladys out to coffee or lunch to discuss it?

I would advise doing this on a DIFFERENT occasion than the one upon which you intend to hand her your manuscript, to give her the opportunity to back out gracefully if she discovers that she’s bitten off, as they say, more than she can chew. Trust me, if the task IS bigger than she can comfortably take on within the next month or so, you will be MUCH happier if you learn this in advance, even if it means having to track down another first reader.

Schedule it as soon as possible after Gladys has agreed to read your work — but not so soon that you haven’t had a chance to come up with a short, preferably written, description of what you would like your first reader to do to your manuscript.

Include in this list HOW you would like to receive feedback. Verbally? Writing in the margins? On a separate sheet of paper? A Post-It™ note on every page where the story flags?

Also, what level of read are you seeking? Should Gladys go over the manuscript with a fine-toothed comb (a real bore, for most readers, FYI), or just ignore spelling errors?

This level of specificity may seem a tad schoolmarmish, but having the list on hand will make the subsequent discussion substantially easier on both you and Gladys, I promise. (As long-term readers of this blog may have noticed, I’m not a big fan of leaving expectations unspoken.)

The catch: once you have made this list, you have an ethical obligation to stand by it; no fair calling Gladys up in the middle of the night after you get the manuscript back, howling, “How could you not have caught that the pages were out of order, you ninny?”

While you are explaining what it is you would like your first reader to do, mention that in order for the feedback to be useful to you, you will need it within a month. Or six weeks. Or, at the outside, eight.

You choose, but try not to make it much less or much more. That’s long enough for a spare-time reader to get through pretty much any manuscript under 500 pages without pulling any all-nighters, so you need not feel as though you are proposing a pop quiz, but not so long that Gladys will simply set it aside and forget it.

The point here is to select a mutually comfortable date that is NOT on top of one of your own deadlines for getting work out the door.

I cannot emphasize this last point enough: do NOT hand your manuscript to Gladys within a few weeks of a submission deadline, even a self-imposed one. Even if she does everything perfectly, it’s not fair to ask her to share your time pressure — and if she doesn’t respond as you like, it’s just too easy to blame her disproportionately if — heaven forfend! — you miss your deadline.

Before you roll your eyes at that last part, hands up, everyone who has ever had to revise on a tight deadline. Were YOU completely reasonable, or even marginally sane, two days before your deadline? I rest my case.

If you are working on a tight deadline — say, having to revise an entire novel within the next three weeks, as I had to do around this time last year; that’s not an unheard-of deadline for an agented writer, by the way — it’s just not fair to expect a non-professional to speed-read your manuscript quickly enough for you to be able to use the feedback. (Actually, most freelance editors would charge quite a bit extra for a turn-around time this short.) If you can cajole your writing friends into doing it within such a short timeframe, regard it as a great favor, of the let-me-send-you-flowers variety.

But if you thrust Gladys, a non-writer, into that position, don’t be surprised if you never hear from her again. Or if you are still waiting to hear back months after that pesky deadline.

If you like ol’ Gladys well enough to respect her opinion, don’t put that kind of strain upon your friendship. Agree upon a reasonable deadline, one far enough from any imminent deadlines of your own that you will not freak out if she needs to go a week or two over.

Make sure to explain precisely why you need it back in a timely manner. If she gives you feedback after the agreed-upon date (you will explain kindly in the course of this conversation), while you will naturally still value Gladys’ opinion, you will not have time to incorporate it into the book before your next submission. Being able to turn the book around that quickly (you will tell her) is the difference between being the kind of helpful friend who gets thanked in acknowledgments and the kind of friend who is appreciated in private.

After you state the deadline, ASK if it will be a problem. If Gladys hesitates at all, remind her that it’s perfectly okay to say no. In fact, you would appreciate it, because you are at a point in your career where you need prompt feedback, and while she was your first choice (even if she wasn’t), you do have others lined up (even if you don’t).

Say this whether it is true or not; it will make it easier for her to decline if she feels overwhelmed. By allowing her the chance to bow out BEFORE you’ve gone to all the trouble of printing up a complete manuscript, you are underscoring that you realize that she is promising something significant, and you appreciate it.

Discuss, too, what she should do if something comes up that will prevent her from turning it around as quickly as you and she would like. At minimum, ask her to call or to e-mail RIGHT AWAY, so you can find another first reader, rather than waiting until a few days before you expect to see it. Promise not to yell at her if she actually does need to make this call; tell her you’re already brainstorming about back-up readers.

A week before the deadline, call or e-mail, to ask how the reading is going. This will give Gladys yet another opportunity to back out, if she is feeling swamped.

No, this isn’t nagging. If she asked to read your manuscript out of simple curiosity — a very common motivation — she will have realized it by now. If this is the case, try not to make a scene; just set up a specific date and time to get the manuscript back.

And don’t forget to thank her for any feedback she has had time to give you.

If Gladys can’t make the deadline but still wants to go forward, set another deadline. It may seem draconian to insist upon specific dates, but inevitably, the writer is the person who loses if the feedback relationship is treated casually. If you are open at every step to Gladys’ backing out, you will significantly reduce the probability that she will let you down after two months.

Or four. Or a year. I’m fairly certain that at least one of the first readers of my first novel has had it since we were both in our mid-20s; perhaps she will get around to it just after we start collecting Social Security.

If you present these requests politely and in a spirit of gratitude, it will be hard for even the most unreasonable Gladys to take umbrage. If you respect Gladys’ opinion enough to want her to read your book, you should respect her ability to make an informed opinion about whether she can commit to doing so. By taking the time to learn her literary tastes, ascertain that she has time to give you feedback, and not allowing your manuscript to become a source of guilt for months to come, you will be treating her with respect.

Your writing deserves to be taken seriously, my friends — by others and by yourself. The more seriously you take it, by seeking feedback in a professional manner, the better it will become.

In my next post, I shall discuss how to elicit specific information from your first readers, to gain insight upon problems you already know exist in the book. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

A few words on feedback, part VII: more trouble with Gladioli

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Last time, I introduced the saga of Gladys, a well-meaning soul who made the mistake of saying one day to a friend who happened to be an aspiring writer, “Oh, I’d love to read your book.”

Quite unaccountably, the friend heard this as, “Give me your book to read, please, and I will give you good feedback upon it.” Whereas what Gladys really meant was, “I’m not a writer. Please like me anyway.”

What we have here, my friends, is a failure to communicate, one that is likely not only to result in the writer’s not getting the kind of feedback she needs, but also rather likely to end the friendship.

This particular piece of miscommunication is more common than writers like to admit — and is all too often the underlying cause of those knuckle-gnawingly frustrating situations where a first reader holds onto a manuscript for so long that the writer’s already taken the book through three more drafts.

I’ll come clean: it happened to me more than once before I cracked the code. I had a first reader who BEGGED for weeks on end to read a manuscript of mine. I did everything right: I explained that to read a manuscript prior to publication was a large responsibility, gave her a sheet of questions I wanted her to answer after she had read it, and took her out to lunch in order to thank her for the effort she was about expend on my behalf.

Six nail-gnawing months later, I asked for the manuscript back, even if she hadn’t read it. As it turned out, she hadn’t, but she had positively filled the margins of Ch. 1 with glowing praise, concluding with, “You couldn’t PAY me to stop reading now!”

Someone must have coughed up some dosh, as she apparently stopped reading three pages later. “I liked it so much,” she reported, “that I wanted to wait until I had time to enjoy it.”

Moral of the story: I should have told her I would buy her lunch AFTER she finished — and should have made absolutely certain that she understood the difference between a casual read and the scrutiny expected of a first reader.

Which includes an obligation to read the manuscript quickly — or to let the writer know in advance not to expect back anytime soon. Unless both sides of the equation understand what is going on, it can only end in tears. Or, at any rate, in the writer’s tapping her watch to see if it’s still running, waiting for all of that luscious feedback that is never to come.

Naturally, such behavior engenders some resentment in writers against their Gladioli. (I’ve decided that’s the plural of Gladys, for those of you who didn’t tune in last time.) “Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,” we demand, “and make me travel forth without a cloak?”

Okay, so it was Shakespeare who said it. But if you’d thought of it in the moment, I’m sure you would have put it that way, too.

Gladys intends to get back to the manuscript, really she does, but my goodness, when is she going to find the time? It’s not as though a manuscript is bound, like a book, rendering it easy to tote around and read in spare moments.

Over time, she tends to start to resent the task — NO MATTER HOW GOOD THE BOOK MAY ACTUALLY BE. Most often, this resentment manifests in holding on to your manuscript indefinitely.

Maddening, isn’t it? We expect our friends to devour our books, relish them, and call us in the dead of night to say that it’s the best book they’ve ever read. C’mon, admit it: in the depths of our dark little souls, we long for positive reinforcement.

Okay, we long for a LOT of positive reinforcement.

If we approach our work professionally, we also yearn for our first readers to make the two or three constructive suggestions that will lift our books from good to superlative.

And if we’re conscientious members of writing communities, many of us put substantial effort into providing precisely that kind of feedback. (Yet another reason that it’s a good idea to check the feedback expectations and practices of other members of a writers’ group before you join: it’s no fun giving out a whole lot more feedback than you receive.) Like most freelance editors, my earliest editorial work was unpaid. The moment at which I knew I should be doing it professionally was, in fact, when I was doing a favor for a friend.

A good novelist, my friend was living the writer’s nightmare: after having taken her book through a couple of solid drafts, an editor at a major house had dropped a raft of professional-level feedback — which is to say, a ruthless, take-no-prisoners critique — on her, feedback that, if followed to the letter, would entail axing significant proportions of the book, trashing her primary storyline, and changing the race of a significant character.

Naturally, she called me in tears. I was an excellent choice: I had read the latest draft, and the one before it, and was able to produce practical suggestions on the spot. If she began the story at a different juncture, I pointed out, and rearranged certain other elements, her plot could still work.

There was a long minute of silence on the other end of the phone when I’d finished talking. “My God,” she whispered, “that could work.” And it did; the editor bought the book shortly thereafter.

This, if we’re honest about it, is what we want our first readers to provide. Since I had been giving feedback on novels since I was a bucktoothed kid in braids, I was able to come up with answers — but is it really fair to ask someone who has never pieced a plot together to pull off a similar feat?

No wonder poor Gladys feels put on the spot. Her writer friend’s expectations are pretty high. And by the time the writer has become impatient enough to ask where the heck the feedback is, she is not only dealing with her guilt over having procrastinated, but also with the additional trauma of an angry friend.

Yes, I said ANGRY; don’t hold it in.

While most of us are astonishingly patient with agents and editors who do not respond to queries or hold on to manuscripts that they’ve asked to see for months at a time, we’re seldom as patient with our first readers, are we? The writer too timid to call an agent who’s had a requested three chapters for a year will often go ballistic at the friend who’s had the same pages for a third of that time.

Logically, that’s a bit odd, considering that the agent is being paid to read manuscripts and the friend isn’t, but that’s the way we feel.

Once the situation has gone this far, it’s quite hard to fix it without generating resentment (our word du jour, apparently) on both sides. The only way to get out of it gracefully is to call the remiss Gladys — or send her an e-mail, if you’re afraid that you’ll yell at her — BEFORE you have lost your temper completely and ask for the manuscript back.

Politely. Ignore her protests that she is really intending to get to it soon, honest, because she won’t.

There’s no need to be mean about it, though. Cast your request as if it had nothing to do with her: “I’d love to hear what you have to say, but manuscripts are actually pretty expensive to produce, and I’ve just found the perfect person to give me feedback on it. Would you mind if I saved a little money by passing your copy on to him?”

This may sound a bit nasty, an example of patented Pacific Northwest passive-aggression, but believe me, it’s far less confrontational than almost anything else you could say. (Which, I suppose, means that it’s a really GOOD example of patented Pacific Northwest passive-aggression.)

Just accept that Gladys had no idea how much time it would take, and move on. And just say no the next time she offers.

As, astonishingly, the Gladioli of the world often do. They must be insulating their attics with their hapless friends’ unread manuscripts.

Tell her that you’ve decided to rely on professional feedback this time around, or have joined a writers’ group that made you take a vow of exclusivity, or that you’ve decided to hide your manuscripts in your attic like Emily Dickinson.

Just keep her well-meaning mitts off your writing until it’s time to send her a postcard, telling her when she will be able to purchase it in a store. Because that is precisely what she thought you were handing her in the first place, bless her heart. Keep her out of the process until she can support you by being the first on her block to buy your book.

Moral #2 for the day, and the axiom I hope you all will take from today’s lesson: at the revision stage, DO NOT TREAT YOUR MANUSCRIPT LIKE A BOOK.

That giant noise you just heard was the celestial choir intoning, “Huh?”

You heard me, heavenly flock of high Cs. When you are looking for feedback on a manuscript, it doesn’t make sense to think of it a book, a finished product that someone might, say, purchase or give to a friend as a gift. While it is still a work in progress, it is a lump of clay, not the bronze sculpture you will eventually cast from your clay model.

Don’t hand it to someone who will only see the clay. Hand it to someone who will help you perfect the form before you set it in bronze.

If you DO find yourself in a standoff with a Gladys, whatever you do, don’t sit around and seethe in silence. Say something, and don’t let it wait too long.

Seriously, just do it. If you do not take action, Gladys will eventually have to come up with a strategy to deal with her obligation — and what she comes up with may not be very pleasant for you. Often, Gladioli will turn their not having realized that reading a book draft is a serious time commitment into a critique of the unread book:

“Well, I would have read it, but it was too long.”

“I was really into it, but then a plot twist I didn’t like came in, and I just couldn’t go on.”

“I liked it, but it didn’t move fast enough. I always skip to the ends of books to see how the plot turns out.”

These all might be legitimate criticisms from someone who has actually read the manuscript — okay, all but that last bit — but from a non-finisher, they cannot be sufficiently disregarded. They are excuses, not serious critique.

Please do not allow such statements to hurt your feelings, because they are not really about the book — they are about the reader’s resentment of the feedback process. Gladys just didn’t know what to do with that ball of clay.

When you hear this type of critique used as an excuse for not reading, thank Gladys profusely, as if she has just given the Platonic piece of feedback — and get the manuscript back from her as soon as humanly possible.

“My secret, if I must reveal it,” quoth the illustrious Alexis de Tocqueville, “is to flatter their vanity while disregarding their advice.” Tell her that you know in your heart she is right, and you don’t her to read another word until you’ve had time to revise.

Then rush out and find another first reader, preferably one with the vision to see both the clay and the sculpture it will one day be.

Is this starting to make you fear ever handing your manuscript to another human being at all? Never fear — next time, I shall talk about how to deal with a Gladys situation that has already extended past the friendship-threatening point, and give you some tips about how to plan in advance to avoid its ever getting there.

In the meantime, do any of you have a Gladys story? If so, why not post a comment about it, so those new to the situation won’t feel so alone? And, of course, keep up the good work!

A few words on feedback, part VI: combing out the snarls

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This past autumn, when I was couch-bound with mono, my SO decided that it would be a good time to adopt a new cat, as reclining while slowly petting a nervous animal was about as much exercise as I could muster. Because we like pets with a past, he trolled the local animal shelter for a kitty down on his luck, bringing home the largest, filthiest feline I had ever seen: matted fur, crusted eyes, snaggle-toothed. (I believe he was orange, but it was a month before we were sure.) In time, the kitty calmed down and began cleaning himself again, an activity he’d apparently abandoned while incarcerated. Gradually, as he wore away more and more of his layers of grime with his tongue and I with my brush, he became shiny, even fluffy.

A few weeks ago, he looked up at me while I was brushing him, and I realized that he had very pretty eyes. It had merely taken months of care and security before he could show them off.

Being me, I instantly thought of what a good parallel that was for editing a manuscript.

Trust me, freelance editors see some pretty mangy manuscripts: the trick is often to see potential under the matted fur, because much of the time, the problem isn’t a lack of talent or inventiveness, but of structure. Or of a writer’s not having completely found his voice yet — it’s exceedingly rare to discover it in the first draft of one’s first book. Or even simply not knowing how a manuscript should be formatted.

In days gone by, agents and even editors at major publishing houses had the time to take a comb to a manuscript that showed promise, to groom it for the big show. Now, unfortunately, writers are expected to make their work camera-ready unassisted by the pros.

And that’s where a good feedback-giver is can be a real boon. Slowly, gradually, and often much to the writer’s chagrin, it’s possible to comb out the snarls, to reshape the beast into something closer to the carefully-groomed animal an agent or publishing house would expect to see. And every so often, editor and writer alike are stunned when something of startling beauty emerges.

I’m bringing this up today because just as it’s hard to see (without special mirrors, at least) the back of one’s own head to check for wayward tangles, a writer can’t always see the snarls remaining in a manuscript she has been polishing for a while. A kind outsider with a good comb can help reveal the beauty underneath the problem, but to do so takes courage: one runs the risk of being scratched.

A careless outside observer with a heavy touch and a lousy comb, however, is just going to send the writer scurrying under the nearest couch, yowling.

Funny how this analogy sprang to mind again as soon as I began writing about first readers who hang onto manuscripts forever, isn’t it? From the poor writer’s perspective, these sorts offer the prospect of a good, thoughtful book combing, but leave the manuscript out in the rain to tangle still more.

Some of you know what I’m talking about, right? Yesterday, when I was discussing the desirability of setting time limits for your first readers, I’m quite sure I heard some chuckles of recognition out there.

But I also have been sensing some puzzled silence from those of you who have never solicited non-professional feedback outside a writing group. “Why is she setting up so many restrictions on who would make a first reader?” I’ve heard some of you muttering over well-bitten fingernails. “Why is she advising building as many fail-safes into the exchange as one might expect in your garden-variety nuclear test facility?”

In a word: experience.

As I keep pointing out throughout this series, for a non-writer — or for a not-very experienced-writer, even — being handed a manuscript and asked for feedback can be awfully intimidating. Yet in a publishing environment where agents and editors simply do not have the time to give in-depth (or often even single-line) responses to queries, writers hit up their friends.

Friends who all too often are too polite to say no or, heaven help us, think that giving feedback on a manuscript-in-progress is a jaunty, light-hearted, casual affair, as simple and easy as reading a book on a beach. To be fair, writers proud of their own work and expecting people to plop down good money in bookstores for it frequently share this assumption.

A sharp learning curve awaits both parties. At least the writer is aware that some commentary over and above, “Gee, I liked it,” is expected.

Imagine the reader’s surprise when she starts reading, though, spots problems — and realizes that the writer might genuinely have expected her not to be a passive consumer of prose, but an active participant in the creative process. Imagine her surprise when she asked not just to identify what she dislikes about the book, but also to come up with suggestions about what she’d like better.

Imagine her surprise, in short, when she learns that it’s actual work. (Hey, there’s a reason I get paid for doing it.)

Writers tend to complain about the feedback they get from kind souls decent enough to donate their time to feedback, but let’s pause for a moment and think about the position of a friend impressed into first reader duty. Chances are, this friend (I’ll call her Gladys because it looks good in print) committed herself to reading the manuscript without quite realizing the gravity of the offer — or perhaps not even that she’d made a promise at all.

Okay, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but to spare you some chagrin: from a non-writer’s POV, “Oh, I’d love to read your work sometime” is generally NOT an actual invitation to share a manuscript.

Honest — for most people, it’s just a polite thing to say in response to the news that an acquaintance is a writer. Among ordinary mortals, a conversational “I can’t wait to read it!” may most safely be translated as “I’m trying to be supportive of you,” “I’m looking forward to your being famous, so I can say I knew you when,” and/or “I have no idea what I should say to an aspiring writer,” rather than as, “I am willing to donate hours and hours of my time to helping you succeed.”

Not everyone who likes to pet a passing kitty is willing to get busy working out the tangles in his coat, if you catch my drift.

This is why, in case you were wondering, the Gladyses of the world (Gladioli?) are so often nonplused when a writer to whom they have expressed such overtly welcoming sentiments actually shows up on their doorsteps, manuscript in hand.

Poor Gladys was just trying to be nice. For the sake of Gladys and every kind soul like her, please consider adhering to my next tip:

Make sure IN ADVANCE that your first readers fully understand what you expect them to do — and that no matter how gifted a writer you may be, reading to give feedback necessarily involves significantly more effort than merely reading a book.

Do I hear members of good critique groups shouting, “Amen!” out there in the ether?

As those of us who have been in the position of feedback-giver can attest, it’s not enough just to be able to spot the problems in the text — the additional challenge is to be able to phrase the requisite critique gently enough that it will not hurt to comb out those snarls, yet forcefully enough for the writer to understand why it’s a good idea.

In other words, it’s a hard enough challenge for those who already know our way around a manuscript. Imagine how scary the prospect would be for someone who didn’t. In my experience, 99% of casual offerers have absolutely no idea what to do with a manuscript when it is handed to them.

In fact, Gladys is generally dismayed when someone takes her up on her request. Like most people, dear Gladys did not have a very good time in school, and you have just handed her a major reading comprehension assignment; in a flash, you have become her hated 8th-grade English teacher, the one who used to throw his keys at kids who walked in late.

Don’t worry; the school district forced him into early retirement.

It’s not that Gladys doesn’t WANT to help, though. But in her sinking heart, she is afraid of the book report she is going to have to give at the end of the process.

So what does Gladys do? Typically, she doesn’t read the book at all. Or she launches eagerly into it, reading perhaps ten or fifteen pages, then gets sidetracked by the phone ringing or piled-up laundry or the need to go to work.

And that, my friends, is where the problems begin, from the writer’s perspective. Remember, our Gladys isn’t a writer, so she does not have much experience in wresting precious minutes of concentration time out of a busy day. So she sets it aside, in anticipation of the day when she can devote unbroken time to it.

Unfortunately for writers everywhere, very few people lead lives so calm that a week of nothing to do suddenly opens up for their lowest-priority projects.

However good her intentions may have been at first, somehow the book does fall to her lowest priority — and, like the writer who keeps telling himself that he can only work if he has an entire day (or week or month) free, our well-meaning Gladys wakes up in six months astonished to find that she hasn’t made significant inroads on her task.

Hands up, everyone who has ever been the writer in this situation.

I hate to leave you with a cliffhanger in the midst of our little tragedy, but like Gladys, time is running short in my day. But being a writer, and thus used to wringing time to write from a jam-packed schedule, I shall renew the tale tomorrow.

Trust me, appearances to the contrary, it can have a happy ending. Keep up the good work!

A few words on feedback, part IV: the book doctors’ consultation club

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THAT’S how dark it is up Seattle way these days, my friends: I took this picture at noon, and still the cats were battling for time in front of the lightbox. (As was, apparently, a small cactus, but that’s another story.)

Throughout this series, I have been examining various possibilities for finding non-professional (read: unpaid) feedback for your book before you send it out to agents and editors. The timing is not entirely accidental, of course: as I had mentioned several times before year’s end, the first three weeks of any new year are NOT a good time for either querying or submission.

Blame all of those New Year’s resolutions to send out materials: the volume of incoming mail in your garden-variety agency increases exponentially this time of year.

By Martin Luther King, Jr. Day — that’s January 21, for those of you outside the U.S. — however, most of those resolvers will have run out of steam. (I’m not being negative about good intentions; the average New Year’s resolution lasts a touch over three weeks.) Shortly thereafter, Millicent’s cohort of intrepid agency screeners will have dug themselves out from under the piles on their desks by doing what they do best: rejecting as many queries and submissions as quickly as they can.

Grumpily. It’s not the best time to query or submit.

Spend your time revising instead — and seeking out good feedback. Better still, try pulling together a team of first readers capable of catching a lot of different kinds of problems AND identifying your book’s strengths.

I’m not just talking about crackerjack fellow writers here. I’m also referring to readers in your target demographic.

Not to knock writers’ groups, of course: if the mix is right, they can be marvelous sources of trenchant feedback. But every group is different, and often, groups are organized on the basis of friendship or general affinity, rather than shared genre or level of writing experience.

All of these factor are worth considering because, let’s face it, not every talented writer may be the best choice to offer critique on a particular book, any more than any given agent or editor would be the right fit for it.

What you are seeking here is a specialist who can diagnose your book’s problems and prescribe workable solutions. Which means, alas, that even a critique group made up of the most brilliant, cutting-edge, eagle-eyed writers won’t necessarily yield the best feedback for your work.

After all, just because a writer is intelligent and knows a lot about craft doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s familiar with the specific likes and dislikes of a target demographic other than his own, or that a great nonfiction writer would necessarily be able to pinpoint the problems in a novel.

Admittedly, whenever any two writers are exchanging manuscripts for critique, lack of agreement upon what is and isn’t fair game for criticism can lead to trouble, but in a group, advance discussion of goals is even more imperative. If the mix of philosophies is not right — if, for instance, various members are writing in genres with wildly disparate conventions, such as literary fiction and mystery — or if members have different ideas about how much feedback is appropriate, being a member can be more frustrating than empowering.

I could give you literally hundreds of specific examples, but I don’t want to tell tales out of school. Suffice it to say that as an editor, I constantly get queries from potential clients whose creative NF is being ripped apart by the novelists in their critique groups, whose mysteries are being dismissed as characterization-light by literary fiction writers, whose romances aimed at the under-20 set are garnering frowns from the over-60s.

Considering how widely book categories and reading tastes can vary, this is perhaps not entirely surprising.

In the early stages of the writing process, when you are concentrating on story and structure, intra-group differences may be minimal, but if I had a dime for every memoirist who was told by advocates of tight first-person fiction to scrap any effort at objectivity, or women’s fiction writers told by thriller writers to add more sex and violence to the book, I would own my own publishing house.

Where I would publish all of your work, naturally. Perhaps I should start soliciting those dimes.

Writers’ groups can also become a bit stale over time, as members become inured to one another’s literary foibles and quirks. Resentment over past advice not taken can certainly add up as the months go by (for a really good example of this, please see the comments on Part II of this series), and it’s not uncommon for heavy commenters and light commenters to mutter under their breath at one another’s habits.

Not to mention how easy it is to find oneself starting to cater to the tastes of one’s writer’s group. No wonder some pros advise changing critique groups often, or joining more than one.

Am I suggesting that? Well, I might, if I thought you had more time on your hands. But frankly, most of the aspiring writers I know would have considered themselves lucky to be able to grab two consecutive hours for revision during the recent holiday season. Adding yet another time commitment (and if you hold up your end, a writers’ group can be a very serious one) may not be possible for everyone.

So I’m going to streamline my advice a bit. If you are a member of a writers’ group, and you feel that you have not been getting overly useful feedback on your work, you might want to consider whether its members actually are in your target demographic — and if they are not, either switching groups or adding a few outside readers to your feedback team.

As when you are considering any potential first reader, set aside for the moment whether you like the people in your group, or whether you respect them, or whether they have already published books outside your field. Look very carefully at their respective backgrounds and ask yourself: are these the kind of people I expect to buy my book? If they did not know me, would they buy it at all?

If the answer to either is no, go out and find some people who are and will, pronto.

Where should you start looking, you ask? Well, last time, I brought up the notion of approaching readers in your book’s target demographic who might NOT currently be die-hard book-buyers: a third-grade classroom’s worth of potential readers for a children’s book, for instance, or followers of a sport featured prominently in your novel.

This advice may have seemed a tad counter-intuitive: in an earlier post, I had advised getting feedback from inveterate readers of your chosen genre or field, who would already be familiar with the conventions, limitations, and joys possible in books like yours. All of which, of course, can be highly useful background for a critiquer.

Yet it’s also worth considering adding at least one first reader who isn’t a hard-core reader to your team as well. Getting feedback from those who do not read voraciously can sometimes give a writer great insight unavailable from any other source.

Why? Well, in marketing terms, if you can make a case that your book is ideally suited to address the under-served needs of your target demographic — in essence, that it provides those readers with something no recent book aimed at them delivers — that’s a marvelous selling point.

Feedback from folks actually in the demographic will, obviously, provide you with tips on how to achieve that admirable goal. This is especially true if you write nonfiction, as you will need to give details in your book proposal about who your target readers are and how you intend to reach them.

And you can stop rolling your eyes, fiction writers: these days, nonfiction writers are not the only ones expected to be able to say who is likely to read their books and why. Gone are the days when a writer could get away with a shrug and a dismissive, “Anyone interested in literature, I suppose.”

Let’s say you’ve written a lifestyle book for former high school athletes who no longer exercise — a rather large slice of the population, or so I would surmise from the fact that at my last high school reunion, a good two-thirds of my former female classmates seemed to be married to men who answered this description. Three of your five chapters are filled with recipes for fiber-filled bran muffins, salads, and trail mix. Where would you turn for first readers?

Naturally, because you paid attention to an earlier post in this series, you would want to include among your first readers someone familiar with cookbooks, as well as someone who reads a lot of exercise books, right? They would represent the parts of your target market who already buy books like yours.

It would also be well worth your while to seek out jocks from your old high school who have never opened either a cookbook or exercise book before, because they are the underserved part of your target market. In theory, if you can tailor your book’s advice so it makes abundant sense for your old volleyball buddy, you’ll know you have a good shot at writing for people like her.

Hey, you might as well get SOME use from all of those nagging messages Classmates.com keeps sending you about getting back in touch with old playmates, right?

Which leads me to my next tip: find different readers to meet your book’s different needs.

Most of us would like to think that anything we write will invariably touch any given reader, but in actuality, that’s seldom the case. I, for instance, am no fan of golf (I dislike plaid in virtually all of its manifestations), and thus would be a terrible first reader for a book about any of its multifarious aspects. But remember my buddy Mary Hutchings Reed, one of the authors kind enough to let me interview her on the ups and downs of self-publishing a few weeks back? She is an avid golfer, so much so that she’s written a terrific musical on the subject, FAIRWAYS, currently gracing your better country clubs across the nation.

Let me ask you: given the choice between a reader predisposed toward a subject and one who isn’t, which is more likely to get into a book about it deeply enough to give good feedback? Perhaps more to the point, which is more likely to take time out of her busy schedule to do you the favor of giving your book a close read, gratis? (None of this should be construed as my urging you to send Mary your golfing manuscripts, incidentally.)

Nor is it often the case that we happen to have an array of first readers easily at our disposal — although, again, if you join a well-constructed writers’ group, you will in fact have gained precisely that. In the absence of such a preassembled group, though, you can still cobble together the equivalent, if you think long and hard about what individual aspects of your book could use examination.

Once you’ve identified these needs, you can ask each of your chosen readers to read very explicitly with an eye to her own area of expertise, so to speak.

In the lifestyle book example above, it was easy to see how readers from different backgrounds could each serve the book: the cookbook reader could evaluate the recipes, the former athlete could comment on the ease of the exercises, and so forth. With fiction, however, the book’s various needs may be harder to define.

In a pinch, you can always fall back on finding a reader in the same demographic as your protagonist, or even a particular character — specialized readers can be a positive boon to a writer seeking verisimilitude. If a major character is an accountant, try asking an accountant to read the book for professional accuracy. I know many teenagers who get a HUGE kick out of critiquing adult writers’ impressions of what teenage characters are like. And so forth.

Even if you are writing about vampires or fantasy creatures, chances are that some regular Joes turn up in your stories from time to time. If only as soon-to-be-sucked-dry victims.

Naturally, another writer will probably give you more feedback on craft than the sculptor you asked to give his opinion on the use of clay in the book, but what’s wrong with that? You’re assembling a team of specialists, not looking for an all-wise, all-knowing single critiquer.

What does all of this have to do with the cat sitting in front of the lightbox, you ask? Your guess is as good as mine. As always, keep up the good work!

Control, or, yet another reason that New Year’s resolutions about speedy publication may not be the best idea

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I had intended to post another installment in my series on getting good feedback today, but I have to say, some of the holiday cards I’ve been receiving from writers over the last couple of weeks have given me pause. Why, you ask? Well, I am lucky enough to know writers at every stage of the process: published, unpublished, agented and unagented, living and dead. And while the living are marginally more likely to drop me tidings of their work around this time of year, I’ve noticed that whether the writer in question is just beginning a book or just finishing one, just starting the querying process or fifteen years into same, waiting to hear back from editors or agents, fulfilling a book contract, promoting a book, or in the throes of her eighth, every single one expresses the same longing: to have more control over how quickly the process goes.

Because, really, can any of us quite believe just HOW long it takes?

So today, the for my last post of 2007, I am going to address one of the great irritations of a writer’s life: the stress of having to wait, often for long periods, for someone else to make decisions that have a vital impact upon your life and your art.

Every writer who has ever queried an agent, submitted to a small press, or entered a contest is familiar with this peculiar species of stress, right? You pour your heart, soul, and hopes into that submission, send it off — and then find yourself in a seemingly endless limbo, waiting to hear back.

And you wait quietly, because you have heard (accurately) that there’s nothing an agent or editor hates more than being contacted by a nervous writer demanding, “Well? What do you think?” As the days pass, you tell yourself that agencies and publishing houses get stacks of submissions daily, and contests get a lot of submissions, so you should not expect yours to be read right away.

But still, you hope that today, TODAY will be the day when that blasted suspense will end.

Then, as the days stretch into weeks (and sometimes into months), you might start to fantasize scenarios that explain the long delay, a natural impulse for a creative mind to have. If you were asked to send the first 50 pages or the whole manuscript, you might convince yourself that the agent just can’t make up her mind, and thus needs to have everyone in the agency read the submission, too, or that the editor at the small publishing house has taken the book home, so he can read through it again slowly.

Or perhaps a small dragon came bursting into the agency, breathing fire upon the waiting manuscripts, and the agent who loved your pitch at the conference was just too embarrassed to tell you. Rather than forcing Millicent to patch together all of those scorched fragments, you might reason, wouldn’t it be easier if you just sent another copy? Maybe it would be a kindness if you called to check.

Whatever your reasoning might be, you go through agonies, trying to figure out whether to call or not. But because every writers’ publication you have ever seen and conference speaker you have ever heard has told you that agents and editors positively HATE it when writers make follow-up calls, you sit tight.

As time passes, your fantasies start to take on a more sinister aspect. Maybe they’ve lost your address, along with half of your manuscript. (If only you’d put your e-mail address in the slug line, so every page would have contained your contact information!) Maybe a first reader at the agency, an aspiring writer himself, was overcome with jealousy at your matchless prose and threw your manuscript away. (The jerk probably did not even recycle it. That type never does.) Maybe your protagonist reminded the agent so forcibly of her late husband, tragically lost a month ago in a freak ballooning accident, that she has not been able to make it through more than five consecutive pages without bursting into tears and needing to be carried bodily to her therapist’s office.

Or, still worse, did you forget to send a SASE?

By now, you have bite marks on your hand from forcibly restraining yourself from picking up the phone to ask what’s going on with your manuscript. Yet in your heart (and, in some cases, from reading this blog), you know that none of the elaborate explanations you’ve concocted are very likely to be true, right?

99.9% of the time, if the author has not heard back, the submission has not been read yet. (The other .1% of the time, the submission has been lost AND hasn’t been read.)

When it’s your manuscript out there, it’s tough to remember that delay is very seldom a vacillation problem, but a lack of time: queries, excerpts, and entire manuscripts often languish on the corners of desks for months before the right people have an opportunity to read it. And if an agent or editor likes the first few pages, it is not uncommon for her to take it home, intending to read it in her spare time — where it has to compete with spouses, children, exercise, and all of the other manuscripts that made their way home.

All of this spells delay, and bless your heart, you try to be reasonable about it. Even when the pressure of waiting is migraine-inducing (for some reason that medical science has yet to pin down, writers seem more susceptible to migraines than other people; on the bright side, we seem to be far less susceptible to Alzheimer’s), you keep your little chin up.

And, if you’ve been at it awhile, you bitch to your writer friends about it — because, frankly, after years living with this kind of anxiety, your non-writing kith and kin have gotten a trifle impatient with your delay-induced stress. (If you have not yet discovered the balm of talking through your anxiety with someone who’s been through it herself, run, don’t walk, to your nearest writers’ conference to make some friends.)

It doesn’t take long before you find yourself wishing that you hadn’t, in your joy at being asked to submit material, spread the good news quite so widely. Within a remarkably short time after you’ve started to arrive at work with big dark circles under your eyes, coworkers will start to ask, annoyingly, “Why do you put yourself through this?” Your mother worries audibly about your health and sanity. Your partner suggests tentatively that if you took a third mortgage on the house, perhaps you could afford to self-publish. Anything to end the stress.

But allowing writers to languish while minds are made up is, as we know, is how the publishing industry works. No matter how good your writing is, if you’re in it for the long haul, you must live through these long periods of nail-shredding anxiety.

Actually, good writers generally have to put up with it more than bad ones, and professional writers more than unprofessional ones, because poor writing and poor presentation tends to get rejected at the speed of light. Literally: as soon as the first few sentences of a rejectable piece hit the retina of a screener, that manuscript is toast.

At the risk of depressing you into a stupor, these waiting periods do not go away once you have landed a terrific agent. Nor do they become substantially shorter or less stressful, a fact that has come as a surprise to every successfully published writer I know. (Hello, Christmas card list.)

Because, alas, reading speeds do not increase as a manuscript inches along the road to publication. Once you sign with your dream agent and whip your manuscript or proposal into fighting trim, the agent will send it out to editors — frequently waiting to hear from one before moving on to the next.

Cast your mind back a few paragraphs ago, to all of the things that can distract an editor from reading a manuscript, and it may not surprise you to hear that even great writers with magnificent agents end up waiting for months to hear back from a single editor. Then, once the editor decides she likes the book enough to acquire it, she has to pitch it to the rest of the publishing house. More delays.

I tremble to tell you this, but as I can tell you from personal experience, equally great potential for stalling abounds after the publishing contract is signed. Many, many people need to approve each step, from the editor to the publisher to the copyeditor, proofreader, and marketing department.

At any stage, the process could stall — or you could be asked to make a major revision at any point between the editor’s first read of your manuscript and when it is actually printed. It’s not unheard-of, for instance, for an editor to leave a publishing house mid-project, landing a book with a new editor with an entirely different opinion about how it should read. Or even — are you sitting down? — for an author whose book garners poor advance reviews (the industry-specific reviews that come out long before the book is available for sale to consumers) to be asked to make revisions THEN.

In this business, a book is not finished until it is actually sitting on a shelf at Barnes & Noble, a fact that has had writers gnawing the bark of nearby trees in frustration for my entire lifetime, at least.

Why am I darkening the last day of 2007 by telling you this? So that in 2008, you will not fall into the trap of thinking that delays are a negative review of your writing.

Long waits are not a reflection upon the quality of your writing, or even necessarily of its marketability, but rather a function of how the industry works. So please, please, don’t beat yourself up with worry in the dead of night — but do provide yourself with a support group of people who will understand and sympathize with your frustration.

Because, as I pointed out just before Christmas, well-meaning folks who don’t know how the business works will keep peppering you with unintentionally cruel questions like, “So, when is your novel coming out?” They will be astonished when their friendly concern causes you to burst into tears, because some agent has been sitting on your first three chapters for the past nine weeks; other writers will be neither surprised nor blame you for it.

That’s why it’s a good idea to start building your support system long before you finish your first book, for otherwise, most of the people around you will have a hard time understanding that difficulty in attracting an agent, or your agent’s having trouble placing the book, is not necessarily a reflection of your talent as a writer.

You can tell yourself that 20 times a day while you’re waiting to hear back, but that doesn’t mean their unspoken dismay does not hurt. The important thing to remember is that while your work is about who you are, the way the industry treats writers isn’t.

When I was a kid, my older brother’s favorite joke was a shaggy dog story about an old man leading his heavily-laden burro from village to village across a long stretch of desert. Every time they near anything that looks remotely like a water source, the burro asks, “May I have a drink now?” Each time, the heartless old man replies, “Patience, jackass, patience.” My brother could keep the patter up for half an hour at a time, weaving it through a lengthy and ever-changing tale about the old man’s adventures: at each stop, no matter where, the same question, the same response: “Patience, jackass, patience.”

Naturally, what made the joke so appealing to a prepubescent boy bent upon tormenting his little sister was the ultimate pay-off: after so much repetition, the listener would inevitably either express some wonder whether the story was ever going to reach its point. And then the teller could chide her: “Patience, jackass, patience.”

After the first telling (out of, if my recollection is correct, approximately 4700), I tried my best to stay still, to say nothing, to pretend I didn’t even hear him, but eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. Even running away as fast as possible the moment he uttered the first line of the joke gave him the excuse to shout it after me: “Patience, jackass, patience!”

If only I had known that he was preparing me for a life as a writer. In the face of such relentless taunting, it honestly does take practice to sail through it all with one’s sense of humor intact — and without beginning to wonder what one could possibly have done in this lifetime or the last to deserve such slow torture.

Trust me, neither you nor your book has done anything to deserve it: it’s merely that the timing of acceptance or rejection is utterly, completely, excruciatingly out of the writer’s control.

Oh, and if an agency’s had your first 50 pages or entire manuscript for a couple of months, it’s perfectly okay to call or e-mail; the manuscript might genuinely be one of the .1% that has gotten lost, and if you wait much more than 3 months to follow up, the chances of their finding it are slim to none. (The rule of thumb is that you SHOULD call if you haven’t heard back in double the time that they specified.) Mum’s the word when you’re querying, though, or if you sent an unsolicited manuscript, or if you’re dealing with one of those annoying agencies that tells submitters up front that they will respond only if the answer is yes.

Happy New Year, everybody, and keep up the good work!

A few words on feedback, part II: just when you thought that ex might come in handy

Last time, I waxed long, if not precisely poetic, on the desirability of getting some trustworthy soul to read your work IN ITS ENTIRETY before you send it out to an agent, editor, or contest. Trustworthy, in this case, means objective as well as truthful, well-read in your book’s genre yet not inflexibly wedded to its conventions.

Not, in other words, the kind of reader that you’re likely to find through the simple expedient of asking everyone at work who happens to think your impression of Groucho Marx is funny. It can be tough to find a good first reader, but from a professional perspective, necessary.

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, it’s essential from an emotional perspective as well. Think about it: what are you doing when you send out virgin material to a total stranger who, after all, has the institutional ability to change your life by bringing your book to publication? Basically, it’s the equivalent of bypassing everyone you know in getting an opinion on your fancy new hairdo and going straight to the head of a modeling agency.

Maybe not the best FIRST choice, in terms of bolstering your self-esteem.

As I have pointed out several times this fall, amongst professional writers, agents, and editors, feedback tends to be honest to the point of brutality; professionals have no reason to pull their punches. If a publishing professional does take the time to critique your work — a compliment that has become rarer and rarer for submissions — the criticism comes absolutely unvarnished. Even when rejection is tactful, naturally, with the stakes so high for the author, any negative criticism feels like being whacked on the head with a great big rock.

I’m trying to save you some headaches here.

Far too few aspiring writers get honestly objective feedback on their work before they send it out. Instead, as I deplored last time, they give it to relatives or friends, whether or not they have any experience whatsoever giving the kind of feedback good writers need.

Even when these would-be helpful souls do have relevant reading or writing experience, the prospect of having to walk the thin line between being truthful enough to provide useful critique and crushing a loved one’s fragile ego can be awfully darned intimidating. (A recent post on Buzz, Balls & Hype gives an insightful peek into how and why — and many thanks to sharp-eyed reader Linda for calling my attention to it.)

Save your supporters for support. What you need from a first reader is well-informed, practical advice based upon a thorough understanding of your target market.

Translation: it shouldn’t come from people who already love you.

Or hate you, for that matter. One of the miracles of both love and hate is the emotion’s ability to jaundice the eye of the beholder.

So no matter how supportive, kind, literate, critical, eagle-eyed, or brutally honest your parents may be – and I’m sure that they’re sterling souls – their history with you renders them not the best sources of feedback. The same principle applies to your siblings, your children, your best friend since you were three, and anyone who has ever occupied your bed while you were in it for any length of time since you hit puberty.

ESPECIALLY anyone who has ever occupied your bed. Even on a very casual basis.

And yes, in answer to the question hanging on the tips of so many tongues out there, that includes other writers. Being horizontal with a first reader can have the same effect on truthfulness as tears on mascara: things get murky, and lines previously well-drawn begin to blur.

Which is not to say that pursuing rich, full emotional relationships with fellow writers is a bad idea. It undoubtedly is — as long as everyone concerned has a clear understanding of when support is called for, and when no-holds-barred critique. (It’s also not a bad idea to talk about who has first dibs on milking shared experiences for material. Believe me, there are easier things than waking up one morning to find a baby picture of yourself on the cover of a friend’s book: ask first.)

But I digress. Yes, it can be hard to find a good first reader, but it truly is worth your while. If you haven’t shown your writing to another trustworthy soul — be it through sharing it with a writers’ group, workshopping it, having it edited professionally, or asking a great reader whom you know will tell you the absolute truth — you haven’t gotten an adequate level of objective feedback.

I know, I know: it seems as though I’m harping on this point. However, I regularly meet aspiring writers who have sent out what they thought was beautifully-polished work to an agent without having run it by anyone else — only to be devastated to realize that the manuscript contained some very basic mistake that objective eyes would have caught easily.

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

If you belong to a writers’ group, you already have a built-in problem-catching system in place — or you do if you belong to a GOOD writers’ group. If you have been hanging with other writers too kind to tell you about logical holes in your text, grammatical problems, or the fact that your protagonist’s sister was names Myrna for the first hundred pages and Myra thereafter, it really would behoove you to have a few more critical eyes look over your work before you send it out.

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

And maybe you are right. I am not saying that a writer can’t be a good judge of her own work — she can, if she has a well-trained eye, is not prone to coddling herself, and sufficient time to gain perspective on it.

That last condition is the rub, isn’t it? Ray Bradbury, I’m told, used to lock each of his manuscripts up in a desk drawer for one full year before taking them out for revision. After that long, and after working on so many projects in between (our Mr. B. has always been rather prolific), he could come back to it with a relatively unbiased eye.

I would be the last person to trot out that tired old axiom about killing your darlings — hands up, everyone who has attended a writers’ workshop and seen a promising piece that needed work darling-chopped into a piece of consistent mediocrity. CONSIDERING killing your pet phrases is often good advice, but for a writer with talent, the writer’s pet phrases are often genuinely the best part of the work.

Take that, Dorothy Parker.

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

Ideally, you would run your submission materials past your writing group, or a freelance editor familiar with your genre, or a published writer IN YOUR GENRE. No matter how good a poet is, her advice on your nonfiction tome on house-building is unlikely to be very market-savvy, unless she happens to read a lot of house-building books.

However (and this is not an insignificant however, either), not all of us have the kind of connections or resources to command that kind of readership. Professional editing, after all, isn’t particularly cheap, nor are the writing conferences where you are likely to meet writers in your field.

And even then, it’s considered pretty darned rude for an aspiring writer to walk up to a total stranger, however famous, and hand him a manuscript for critique. As in any relationship, there are social niceties to be observed first. (If you’re in any doubt whatsoever about where the lines are drawn, please see the INDUSTRY ETTIQUETE category at right BEFORE you approach your first industry insider.)

Do I hear some of you out there gnashing your teeth? “I HAVE been giving my work to first readers,” I hear you grumbling, “and they NEVER give me feedback. Or they hold onto the manuscript for so long that I’ve already made revisions, so I can’t really use their critique. I’ve gotten SAT scores back faster. Or they so flood me with minute nit-picking that I have no idea whether they even LIKED the manuscript or not. I really feel burned.”

If you do, you are not alone: trust me, every freelance editor has heard these complaints hundreds of times from new clients. In fact, freelance editors ought to be downright grateful for those poor feedback-givers, as they tend to drive writers either to despair or into the office of a pro.

At the risk of thinning the ranks of potential editing clients, I have a few suggestions about how to minimize frustrations in the first reader process.

First, never, but NEVER, simply hand a manuscript to a non-professional reader (i.e., someone who is not a professional writer, editor, agent, or teacher) without specifying what KIND of feedback you want.

Why not? Remember that intimidation factor I mentioned above? Well, the first-time manuscript reader often becomes so intimidated at the prospect of providing first-class advice that she simply gives no feedback at all — or just keeps putting off reading the manuscript.

Sound familiar?

Other readers will run in the other direction, treating every typo as though it were evidence that you should never write another word as long as you live. All of these outcomes will make you unhappy, and might not produce the type of feedback you need.

Second, in case anyone has missed the subtle hints I’ve been dropping over the last couple of days, RELATIVES, LOVERS, AND CLOSE FRIENDS ARE POOR CHOICES FOR FEEDBACK. Think very, very carefully before you place them in that particularly hard spot.

If you DO have them read it, make a positive statement when you give them the manuscript, limiting what you expect in response. By telling them up front that you do not expect them to do the work of a professional editor (which at heart, many first-time manuscript readers fear), you will make the process more pleasant for them and heighten the probability that you will get some useful feedback.

Couching the request in terms of feeling reactions rather than textual analysis is a great way to make both writer and reader comfortable: “I have other readers who will deal with issues of grammar and style,” you can tell your kin, for example. “Don’t worry about sentence structure. I want to know if the story moved you.”

Better still, you can couch it in a compliment. “You know the world of the pool hall so well, my darling,” you can suggest to your lover, “that I want you to concentrate on whether the characters feel real to you. Don’t give even 38 seconds’ consecutive thought to the writing itself; I’ve got someone else reading for that.”

Notice how I keep bringing up other readers? If you do (sigh…) decide to use your kith and kin as first readers, it can been VERY helpful to cite other readers, even if they’re imaginary. Why? Knowing that others are available to give the hard-to-say feedback can lighten the intimidated reader’s sense of responsibility considerably, rendering it much, much more likely that s/he will enjoy reading your book, rather than coming to regard it as a burdensome obligation.

“Burdensome?” I hear some tremulous souls cry. “My delightful literary romp?”

For an ordinary reader, by no means — but did you seriously believe that handing your baby to your cousin at Thanksgiving, knowing full well that you were scheduled to meet again at Christmas, wasn’t imposing an obligation to read it, and pronto? Or that giving in to your coworker’s repeated requests to read something you’ve written, even though that meant her having to meet your reproachful, why-haven’t-you-read-it-yet eyes every week at the staff meeting, didn’t involve setting up a tacit deadline?

To appreciate the literature-dulling potential of deadline-imposition fully, you need only cast your mind back to high school for a moment: which did you enjoy more, the book you were assigned to read, the one that was going to be on the final exam, or the one you read in your own good time?

Still unsympathetic to first readers who hang onto manuscripts forever and a day? Would it help to consider that most people don’t understand that writers want to submit their work to agents, editors, and contests almost immediately upon completion?

I know, I know: that ex-lover with the three-book contract at St. Martin’s is starting to look pretty good as a first reader. NO, I tell you. It’s a bad idea.

So where should you turn? Ideally, your best first reader choice (other than a professional reader, such as an editor, agent, or teacher) is a fellow writer in your own genre, preferably a published one. Second best would be a good writer in another genre. Third is an excellent reader, one who has read widely and deeply and is familiar with the conventions of your genre.

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

Which brings me to my third suggestion: stick to readers familiar with your genre. Someone who primarily reads nonfiction is not the best first reader for a novel; an inveterate reader of mysteries is not the best first reader of literary fiction or a how-to book. Readers tend to impose the standards of the books they like best onto anything they read, with results that can sometimes puzzle writers and readers of other genres.

For instance, my fiancé, an SF/fantasy reader since his elementary school days, shocked me on one of our first dates by confessing, in the middle of my rhapsody in praise of John Irving, that he had not been able to make it all the way through THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP. “I found it boring,” he admitted. “Not much happened.”

“A character gets castrated in mid-car crash,” I pointed out, stunned. “How much more action do you want?”

From his reading background, though, he was right: it’s rare that more than a page goes by in a good SF novel without overt action, and mainstream novels tend to be lamentably devoid of, say, time travel. John Irving would be wise, then, to avoid my sweetie as a first reader.

As would I — oh, here’s a great opportunity for a pop quiz. Why SHOULDN’T I use my SF-loving boyfriend as a first reader?

If your first impulse was to cry out, “He’s double-disqualified! He’s more or less kith and kin, AND he doesn’t read either adult fiction or memoirs on a regular basis! What’s that he’s reading on the couch right now, yet another SHARPE novel?” you get an A.

More on the care and feeding of first readers follows in the days to come, of course. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

A few words on feedback, or, a proposition to which you should NOT say yes on New Year’s Eve

I’m posting late today, I’m afraid — the news about Benazir Bhutto, while not exactly a surprise, left me very much saddened. I have been following her career since I was in college; we share an alma mater, and my work-study job involved maintaining files on the doings of alumnae. (Yes, in the 1980s, Harvard did not house the men’s and women’s files together, nor did male and female undergraduates receive the same diploma. You’ve come a long way, baby!) Her story was so interesting that I kept an eye out for her even after it was no longer my job to do so. The world is less fascinating without her in it.

Back to business. I may be jumping the gun on the parade of virtue that prevails in early January, that period when folks are still adhering to their New Year’s resolutions, but as many writers have a day or two of vacation right around now, I thought this might be a good time to start talking about the revision process — and its ever-helpful first cousin, useful feedback.

To clarify the timing: we DO all know better than to send off our queries and submissions during the first three weeks of any given new year, right? Half the writers in the English-speaking world bravely embrace SIOA (Send It Out, Already!) as their New Year’s resolution.

The result: Millicent and everyone at her agency is swimming in exponentially more paper at that time of year than at any other — and in the U.S., agencies are required to get tax statements about the previous year’s sales to their clients by the end of January. The combination of stressors tends to make ‘em a mite grumpy — and, believe it or not, even more eager than usual to reject.

So in case I’m being a bit too subtle here: if you can’t t get requested materials out the door this week, hold off until after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Trust me on this one. The average New Year’s resolution lasts a touch under three weeks (one of the many reasons that I deplore them), so the influx of paper calms down pretty quickly. You can afford to wait until it does.

And while we’re re waiting: it’s revision time! Hooray!

I heard that giant collective guffaw from my long-term readers. “When,” you are asking yourselves, “does Anne think it ISN’T a good time to revise a manuscript? Or, at the very least, to scan it for common mistakes and deviations from standard format?”

Okay, you’ve got me there. I have been preaching that particular gospel quite a bit this month, and with good reason: it is absolutely vital to clear your manuscript (and query letter, and synopsis) of spelling and grammatical errors, pronto.

Or at least before you send it out in a few weeks, after all of those resolvers have gotten it out of their systems. Because you, clever homework-doer that you are, know that there is more to landing an agent than making a single push: success comes to those who keep trying again and again.

And since agency screeners tend to stop reading after just a couple of spelling or grammatical errors, giving a book an honest shot at getting picked up means taking the time to create clean copy. This is not a business where good enough is in fact good enough; technical perfection is expected.

Sound like familiar advice? It should; both of the successfully self-published authors in my recent interview series said precisely the same thing — it’s worth your time to rework the manuscript until it fairly shines. Which just goes to show you that the standards of excellence prevailing in the world of traditional publishing may not be as far from those of the self-published world as one may have heard.

Either way, the author is generally held responsible for mistakes, so you’ll want to minimize them.

Because technical perfection is so important, I implore you, DO NOT rely upon your word processing program’s spelling and grammar checker as your only source of proofreading. As any professional editor will tell you, they tend to be rife with technical errors — mine, for instance, regularly tells me to use the wrong form of there, their, and they’re — and it’s far too easy for a slip of the mouse to convince your dictionary to accept caseless when you mean ceaseless.

Spell check, by all means, but there is no substitute for the good ol’ human eye running down a PRINTED page of text for catching errors.

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

Yes, even if you have a simply immense computer screen — this is an instance where size truly doesn’t matter. (And the masses rejoice!)

Since I edit professionally, I have a monitor that could easily balance a small litter of puppies on it. But I ALWAYS use hard copy for a final edit, both for my work and for my clients’. As my downstairs neighbor would, I’m sure, be overjoyed to tell you, if a deadline is close, I’m going to be sitting in my library, reading the relevant manuscript in its entirety, in hard copy, out loud.

I’m funny that way.

After you have proofed and poked the slower movements of your text, I STRONGLY urge you to have at least one third party reader take a gander at it. At the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, it is NOT the best idea in the world to be the only eyes who see your work before it lands on an agent’s or editor’s desk. (Or the press, if you are intending to self-publish.)

Gaining some outside perspective, via a trustworthy first reader, has many benefits. Most notably, good pre-submission feedback can enable you to weed out the rookie mistakes that tend to result in our old pal Millicent the screener’s choking on her coffee and reaching for the form rejection letter.

Like, for instance, misspelling your own name or address on the title page — which happens more than you might think. Hey, people are in a hurry.

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

The result, of course, is that the agent’s feedback is the first time many writers EVER get an outside opinion of their work.

And, as those of you who have submitted to an agency lately know first-hand, that feedback is usually either minimal or non-existent. Or so generic that it could apply to any manuscript Millicent saw — remember, just because a rejection letter or e-mail is personalized with your name doesn’t necessarily mean that it was written freshly in response to reading your book. Stock phrases like I just didn’t fall in love with it, this is a tough market for fiction, and it doesn’t meet our needs at this time have graced rejection letters for many years; they are not intended as meaningful feedback, but as a polite negative.

It does not, in short, tend to be feedback that’s likely to help a writer improve his work before the next round of submissions. Your writing deserves feedback with content you can use.

Now, there are a lot of places you can receive such feedback. You can ask a professional freelance editor, as I described a few weeks ago; you can join a critique group; you can exchange with another writer. No one method is right for everybody, so you may need to experiment a little before figuring out how you most like to receive feedback.

But remember just before Christmas, when I was preparing you for that inevitable moment when some well-meaning co-celebrant leans over to ask, “So, dear, how’s your writing coming? Published anything yet?” No matter how sincerely this person asks to read your work, no matter how flattering her request may be, no matter how much she swears that she would love nothing better than to read it and tell you what she thinks — if this person is a close friend, lover, would-be or ex lover, or — sacre bleu! — a family member,

DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAKE THIS PERSON THE FIRST READER OF YOUR BOOK.

Long-term readers, chant it along with me now: the input of your best friend, your mother, your siblings, and/or your lover(s), however charming it may be, is unlikely to yield the kind of concrete, tangible feedback every writer needs. No offense to your kith and kin, but it’s true. Ties of affection do not necessarily good readers make.

Far be it from me to suggest that anyone who cares about you might be sweet and generous enough to lie to spare your feelings, but frankly, it happens. Be grateful that you have such supportive folks in your life. Cherish them; appreciate them; cling to them with the tenacity of an unusually insecure leech.

But DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAKE THESE PEOPLE THE FIRST READERS OF YOUR BOOK.

Get other first readers for your manuscripts, because a first reader who does not have the objectivity — or, often, the reading experience in your genre — to tell you the truth about your manuscript is simply not useful for a writer.

The closer the tie, the lower the objectivity — and no, smart people who read a lot are not exempt from this rule. Even if your father runs a major publishing house for a living, your sister is a high-flying agent, and your lover reviews major novelists regularly for THE WASHINGTON POST, they are unlikely to have the perspective necessary to give you objective feedback.

Why? Because they like you.

Don’t fault them for that. It’s their job to make you feel better about yourself — or to make you feel worse about yourself, depending upon your taste in relationships and familial patterns. So when your Aunt Ermintrude says she would just LOVE your manuscript (and trust me, at some point, she will; everyone likes the idea of getting a free advance peek at the next big bestseller), I give you my full permission to use me as your excuse for saying no.

Do it politely, of course, as if you were acting upon medical orders. “I’m sorry, but I’ve been advised by Dr. Mini that until I find an agent, I need to limit myself to objective readers,” or “I would love to, Aunt Ermintrude, but I have a writing group for feedback — what I need you for is support!” tends to go over MUCH better than “What, are you just trying to get out of buying a copy of the book?”

No one likes getting called on that. And, let’s face it, when you do have a book coming out, you DO want your Aunt Ermintrude to buy it — and to talk all of her friends into buying it.

If you think that professional writers don’t cadge on their relatives this way, think again; most of the pros I know keep mailing lists of everyone who has ever cut their hair, cleaned their teeth, listened to their son’s book reports, etc., to send a postcard the instant a new book of theirs comes out.

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

Yes, you read that correctly. Now picture everyone who has ever said to you, “Oh, you’ll have to send me a copy when it comes out.” It can be costly.

Promise to sign it for them instead. Get Aunt Ermintrude — and everyone else who loves you — used to the idea that supporting you means being willing to shell out hard cash for your book.

But DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAKE ANY OF THESE PEOPLE THE FIRST READER OF YOUR BOOK.

So on New Year’s Eve, should you find yourself wrapped in the arms of some charming, well-meaning soul who whispers those words that make the average aspiring writer melt like butter, I’d LOVE to read your book,” you will know what to say, right?

Right? Stop fantasizing about meeting a gorgeous stranger who wants to read your book and concentrate. Trust me, it will be better for both your book and your relationships with your loved ones if you thank him/her/them profusely — and say no.

Ditto with loved ones of every description. My mother is one of the best editors I’ve ever met, and naturally, she is eager to read my work, but we have both been in this business long enough to know that giving birth to a writer pretty much automatically disqualifies a reader from being particularly objective about that writer’s work.

I can feel that some of you still aren’t convinced. Perhaps you have kith and kin who just adore giving their unvarnished opinions to you, ostensibly for your own good. “Is it really worth worrying,” I hear voices out there saying, “that the cousin who told me I looked stupid in my prom dress will be afraid to tell me that Chapter Three doesn’t work? Since Grams has no problem telling me that she hates my husband, why should she hesitate to rip my novel to shreds, if it needs it?”

This is the other primary reason not to ask your loved ones for feedback, even if they are noted for their blithe indifference to any pain their truth-telling might cause to others: if you care about the advice-giver, it’s hard NOT to be emotionally involved in the response.

Ponder that for a moment, and you’ll see that it is true. If your favorite brother critiques your book, rightly or wrongly, it’s probably going to hurt more than if a member of your writing group gives precisely the same advice. And by the same token, the emotional baggage of the relationship, even if it is neatly packed and generally non-obtrusive, may make it harder to hear the advice qua advice.

Also — and I hesitate to bring this up, because, again, I’m sure your kith and kin are marvelous human beings — but all too often, critique by loved ones often runs in the other direction, particularly if you happen to be loved by the type the psychologists used to call passive-aggressive.

Seriously, I have had many, many editing clients come to me in tears because their significant others have pounced on the first typo of the manuscript as evidence that the writer should never have put pen to paper at all. Long-repressed sibling rivalries often jump for joy when they see a nice, juicy manuscript to sink their teeth into, and are you quite sure that your best friend ever forgave you for the time that your 4th-grade soccer team beat hers?

What you need is feedback on your BOOK, not on your relationships. Or, at least, that’s what you need in order to improve your book. (The state of your relationships is, of course, up to you.)

Which is why (hold your ears, because I’m about to start shouting again) YOU SHOULD NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAKE ANY OF THESE PEOPLE THE FIRST READER OF YOUR BOOK.

Often, too, when you are dealing with people unused to giving feedback, being overly-judgmental is not even a reflection of their opinions of your book: in many cases, being vicious is what people think giving feedback means. (And if you doubt this, take a gander at the first efforts of most movie reviewers — or, heck, if you happen to live in the Seattle metro region, at the majority of film reviews in the local free paper THE STRANGER, where most of the contributing writers evidently believe that the title of critic means that they should never, under any circumstances, say anything positive about a movie that might, say, induce a reader to go and see it. Given their editorial philosophy, I’m surprised to see any starred reviews at all in that paper.)

I’m not saying not to show your work to your kith and kin — if it makes you happy, do. But even if your Aunt Mary won a Pulitzer in criticism last year, you probably should not rely solely upon her critique of your manuscript.

Yes, I know: finding good first readers is a whole lot of work, especially if you live in a small town. But, at the risk of wearing out the record, if you are going to be called on a mistake, it is FAR better to be a little embarrassed by a good first reader than rejected by a hyper-critical agent, editor, or contest judge.

That way, you can fix the mistakes when the stakes are low — and, frankly, you are far more likely to get usable feedback. If you are one of the many too shy or too busy to show your work to others, yet are willing to send it out to be evaluated by grumpy literary assistants hyped up on seven lattes before lunch, consider carefully whether you really want your first reader to be someone who does not have either the time or the inclination to give you tangible feedback.

Because, really, will We’re sorry, but your manuscript does not meet our needs at this time tell you whether that orgy scene in Chapter 8 is the problem, or if it’s your constant use of the phrase “Wha-?” in dialogue?

Trust me, you need first readers who will tell you PRECISELY that.

Next time, I shall talk about strategies for getting the kind of good, solid feedback you need without treating your first readers like mere service-providers. (Hey, if you want to do this without engendering social obligations, you really should be working with a paid professional freelancer, rather than your friends.)

Until then, keep up the good work!

So you’re considering self-publishing, part IV: fiction

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For the past few days, I’ve been chatting with recently self-published authors Mary Hutchings Reed and Beren deMotier about what prompted their decisions to bring their books out themselves, rather than pursing the traditional agent + publishing house path, and what a writer who was considering such a step might want to know going into the process. Yesterday, I veered off from the roundtable format in order to ask Beren about the challenges particular to private publication of nonfiction.

Today, I shall be speaking one-on-one with Mary about what the publishing industry would regard an even more daring move on an author’s part: self-publishing fiction.

Why more daring? By any standard and at every stage, fiction is significantly harder to sell than nonfiction, whether you’re talking about landing an agent, approaching a major publishing house, or attracting a buyer’s attention in a bookstore. (That’s the reason that the major publishing houses kept looking at unagented nonfiction book proposals for many years after they stopped even considering unagented novels, in case you’re curious. Now, of course, the big five have policies that preclude reading either unless an agent hands it to them.) The prevailing wisdom has always been pretty adamant that novelists who self-published would have, to put it politely, a significantly harder time selling their books.

So from a traditional publishing point of view, Mary’s not just attempting a dive from the highest board; she’s doing a quadruple backflip during the Olympic trials while simultaneously holding lit sparklers in her teeth and playing The Star-Spangled Banner on the Sousaphone.

Which is why I was so eager to hear what she had to say on the subject. Self-publishing today is a very different thing than it was ten or even five years ago: author-financed books sell side-by-side with those produced by major publishers on Amazon and on bookstore shelves alike. Since it’s now possible to do short runs at very high quality for relatively low cost, the purchaser of a privately published book may not even be able to tell the difference between it and any other well put-together trade paper book.

And that, my friends, may mean a whole new ballgame for those of us who write.

But enough of my ruminations on the subject — let’s welcome back the pro.Mary Hutchings Reed, if you’ll recall, is the author of the fascinating COURTING KATHLEEN HANNIGAN:

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Courting Kathleen Hannigan tells the story of an ambitious woman lawyer, one of the first to join a male-dominated national law firm in the late seventies, whose rise to the top is threatened by a sex discrimination suit brought against the firm by a junior woman lawyer who is passed over for partnership because she doesn’t wear make-up or jewelry. When Kathleen Hannigan is called to testify, she is faced with a choice between her feminist principles and her own career success. Courting Kathleen Hannigan is a story for women and minorities everywhere who are curious about the social history of women in law, business and the professions, institutional firm cultures, and the sexual politics of businesses and law firms.

Again, in the interest of full disclosure: I should make it clear that Mary is a very good friend of mine– in case my ill-concealed enthusiasm for all things Mary had not already tipped you off — and, as I did with Beren, I offered her a blurb for the back jacket of her book. (I’m not entirely sure that she could have stopped me.)

Anne: Welcome back, Mary! You’re an incredibly prolific writer — musicals, short stories, legal texts, fiction — but Courting Kathleen Hannigan was your first novel, right?

Mary: Yes, it followed on my memoir, CAPTAIN AUNT, about blue water sailing and childlessness.

Anne: You have a tremendous eye for the story that has not been written before. When you first told me about COURTING KATHLEEN HANNIGAN, I couldn’t believe that an insider’s view of sexual discrimination at a major law firm hadn’t already been written. It seems like such a natural.

But when I went looking, there just wasn’t much out there written by anyone who wasn’t just guessing — as your book jacket puts it — what goes on behind those beautifully-veneered doors. What did you say when agents asked you to compare it to the current fiction market?

Mary: I tried, and still try, sometimes, to compare it to ONE L, Scott Turow’s novel about being a first year law student at Harvard.

Anne: But that’s pretty dated, isn’t it? It’s based upon Turow’s own experiences at Harvard Law — and given that he was already quite well established as an attorney before he wrote PRESUMED INNOCENT (1987), I tend to think that he didn’t graduate yesterday. It’s more up-to-date than THE PAPER CHASE (1970), I suppose, but in both novels, the subject is law school, not legal practice at a high-powered firm, and the protagonists are men.

Which is why COURTING KATHLEEN HANNIGAN isn’t like what was already on the market about the best of the best young lawyers.

Mary: And yes, to our minds, it’s a good thing, but to “them,” it’s proof no one is interested. What a strange business!

Anne: And yet it’s hard to imagine that there’s another writer out there who would be better qualified to tell this particular story with authority. As one of the first women to make partner in precisely the kind of fims Scott Turow likes to write about, you have a platform for this book that should have made agents and editors fall to their knees and weep.

Mary: I really detest the whole platform discussion. Makes it sound like all fiction is really just sugarcoating a lesson in something-or-other.

Anne: That’s very true. Fiction writers are asked — no, make that told — all the time that their work MUST be autobiographical, as though none of us had any imaginations at all, or as if every novel were automatically a roman à clef. Last year, an editor at a publishing house who was considering buying a novel of mine asked, in a tone of great trepidation, “Will your mother be angry when the book comes out?” Apparently, it hadn’t even occurred to her that my female protagonist might not be a thinly-disguised me, any mother in the book my mother, and so forth. It made me laugh at the time (and my mother laughed even harder), and of course, it’s a compliment to the realism of the novel, but it did bug me.

Have people been assuming that KATHLEEN is just a fictionalized account of your own life?

Mary: Oh, yes. Of course the book draws on my life experience, but there is no one to one correspondence between me and Kathleen Hannigan or any other character and any of my present or former partners or associates.

Anne : Do you think the autobiographical assumption discourages insiders in your profession from writing about it?

Mary: Because everyone who reads it looks to see if they are in it or if someone they know is in it (they think it’s a “tell-all”), there probably is a disincentive to want to publish a work like this.

I’ve stolen a line from a cartoon I saw, “Be nice to me or I’ll put you in my next novel!”

Anne : I always think: be nice to me or I’ll use you as a negative example in the blog.

But seriously, the autobiographical assumption is something I’ve been dealing with for my entire life: my mother and I regularly meet would-be Philip K. Dick biographers who positively refuse to believe that anything Philip wrote wasn’t completely autobiographical at base. He HATED that question.

Authors get it all the time, though. I read somewhere that long after Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had established as a major novelist, journalists kept showing up and asking of her first book, “So, who was the REAL Victor Frankenstein?” as if she had just been sitting in a corner while a friend of hers raised people from the dead while she took notes.

Mary: It only so happens that this particular novel derives from my personal experience, which speaks for itself: I’ve been a partner at two of Chicago’s largest firms, and I get some instant credibility because of their names (Sidley Austin LLP and Winston & Strawn LLP) , and I’ve been named a leading lawyer in my field by several publications, and I’ve won some awards like a lifetime achievement award from Lawyers for the Creative Arts. I also have a fairly high profile in the pro bono legal community, including service on the Legal Assistance Foundation Board, the largest provider of civil legal services to the disadvantaged in Cook County.

Anne : (laughing) That’s not just a platform; that’s an entire building. With all you do, I’m continually astonished that you find TIME to write.

Mary: I’ve written one memoir, six novels, two musicals. and one play plus some short stories and essays since I started trying to learn how to do this in 1993. People think I’m terribly prolific.

Anne : (laughing again) I can’t imagine why they’d think that.

Mary: Here’s what I tell them:

1) I write every day, at the same time, first thing because this is my first priority.

2) If you write a page a day, at the end of the year, an agent will say you have 65 pages too many.

3) I like to write a few pages a day if I can and revise something every day. I’m constantly going back as much as I’m going forward in the process of writing any given novel.

Anne : With that schedule, how long did it take you to write COURTING KATHLEEN HANNIGAN?

Mary: It probably took a year and a half to write the first draft — 450 pages, and another year plus to reduce it to 300 and revise, revise, revise it. I’m a fast writer of first drafts and a constant reviser.

Anne : Me, too — and I have to say, it’s been my experience that a willingness to accept that one’s baby SHOULD be examined with an eye to revision tends to be one of the differences between writers who make it and those who end up giving up. Almost nothing we see on bookstore shelves is a first draft, after all, and agents and editors think of a book as a work-in-progress until it’s actually in the hands of the distributors.

With a writing schedule like yours, how do you handle writer’s block? Or are you one of the lucky ones who doesn’t get it?

Mary: Not really. I have times when I get my priorities screwed up and don’t put my butt in the chair first thing in the morning.

But I’m a firm believer that if I show up, so will the muse, even if I have to type
“I don’t know what to write” a hundred times. Something comes. But it doesn’t come if I’m not ready at the computer to receive it.

Anne : I wish more aspiring writers realized that; I know so many really talented people who keep saying, “When I have a month free, I’m going to tackle this.” But in most of our lives, those months don’t happen that often. If you keep putting off starting — or continuing, or finishing, or revising — books tend not to get done all.

At what point did you start to think of yourself as a writer who happened to be a lawyer, rather than a lawyer who also wrote?

Mary: Writing is something I’ve always wanted to do. When we were in my early forties, my husband said one day that we would hate to die without having sailed across the ocean.

That got me thinking — what was it that I could say that about? And the answer to me was real clear: I wanted to write a novel.

Anne : AND you and Bill sailed across an ocean, or at least across quite a bit of one.

Mary: Bill took a year off from working (he’s a doctor) and Winston gave me an unpaid sabbatical — I took 3 months–and in 1992 we sailed from Norfolk, Virginia to St. Thomas in our 32-foot sailboat, just the two of us. We covered 1600 miles and spent 22 days and nights off shore.

We had 3 very bad storms, and it kind of put things in perspective for me. I understood priorities. I was never going to be able to write a novel and do all the other things I wanted to do if I continued to practice full time as a partner at Winston. I left the partnership and became Of counsel.

Writing my first novel was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. There’s so much to learn, craft-wise, even simple things like getting your characters up and showered and fed every day, moving them across the page!

Anne : That’s another trait that authors who are in it for the long haul tend to have: a willingness to keep adding to that writer’s tool bag. You participate in a couple of critique groups, don’t you?

Mary: It’s where I’ve learned the most. Weekly with Enid Powell, an Emmy award-winning writer, and a monthly novel-writing workshop with Fred Shafer of Northwestern University. It is extremely useful to get feedback from other writers, and to have readers tell you what they take away from what you’ve written.

Anne : So you got a great deal of feedback on COURTING KATHLEEN HANNIGAN.

Mary: I had several professional editors and writers comment on it, and I rewrote and rewrote. Finally, Chicago literary agent Jane Jordan Brown accepted me as a client, and she had a year’s worth of revisions, including getting it down to 300 manuscript pages. She died in 2003, about a month after she declared it ready for the marketplace. I then put it aside for a while and began working on other novels.

Anne : That’s so hard, figuring out when to stop revising your first book and move on to the next. Most writers don’t really plan for that possibility, but you and I both know many, many writers who didn’t land agents until the third or fourth book. Which must seem insanely masochistic to non-writers.

Mary: I think people think you write a novel and then it gets published and then you go on Oprah. Truth is, it’s a very long process, and while agents and publishers and publicists consider your work, novelists write. If you do it every day, and if you write a page or half a page a day, every day, at the end of the year, you have a couple hundred pages, at least.

Anne : And in five years, when you have hit the big time, you have a few projects already drafted for future revision. Successful authors seldom have much breathing space between promoting one book and being expected to produce the next.

As someone who did successfully land a very good agent indeed, what would you say was the best advice you ever got on approaching them?

Mary: Probably from you, Anne. (What did you say?)

Anne : Now, now, my readers are constantly inundated with my advice — and in any case, you had already signed with Jane Jordan Brown before we met.

(Readers: obviously, I did not say this to Mary, as that would have been Hollywood narration — if you don’t know what that is or why not to use it your novels, please see the MANUSCRIPT MEGAPROBLEMS category at right — but she and I met at a writers’ conference years ago. It was the very first panel of the very first day, a discussion of great first lines for books, and as often happens with poorly-organized panels, the moderator had asked the panelists each to come up with an example — and then apparently failed to check before the panel began that they didn’t all pick the SAME example. So we in the audience were presented with a half-hour discussion of the first line of A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. After 20 minutes, I couldn’t resist raising my hand and asking, “Do you have any examples that were originally written in English?” Mary was the only person in the room who laughed, so I knew that there was at least one kindred spirit there. The moderator, on the other hand, looked blank and asked me what I meant, so I actually had to explain that the copy of A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE she held in her hand was a translation from Spanish. Naturally, during the next break, I tracked Mary down at the coffee table and introduced myself. Here endeth the digression.)

So what do YOU say?

Mary: I’d have to say the best advice I ever got was to send a lot of ‘em and keep trying. Don’t get discouraged.

Anne : At the risk of annoying you by bringing up platform again, what was the best thing you’ve ever done to build up your writing resume?

Mary: The actual production (12 sell-outs) of my musical, Fairways, at the Steel Beam Theatre, St. Charles, Illinois, on February 24, 2006.

Anne : I love the idea of a musical about golf — again, once you told me about it, it seemed like a natural. You’re reworking it for television, right?

Mary: Yes, as a series, which will require some rewriting of the plot. The pilot will be filmed in April/May of 2008.

Anne : You’re a very gratifying friend to have, you know: you give me so many opportunities to boast about you.

Speaking of which, have your writer friends been supportive of your decision to self-publish? What about your non-writer friends and relatives?

Mary: Absolutely. Both groups are truly excited for me. Non-writers really don’t know the difference between Ampersand and Simon & Schuster. They just see the product, love the cover, and are so happy for me. People do seem to be in awe of someone who can actually write a whole book!

Anne : So you haven’t been encountering the stigma one hears about with self-publishing?

Mary: I think non-writers don’t know the difference, especially since they can buy it online.

Anne : If you could give only one piece of advice to a fiction writer considering self-publication, what would it be?

Mary: Okay, here are two:

1) Invest in a manuscript editor so that you will have the confidence that your work is ready and deserving of being in print.

2) Do an honest assessment of all your contacts who can possibly help you and their willingness: prepare your mailing list, all the groups with whom you have a real relationship, all the groups with whom having a relationship would be useful and how you might connect with them. Decide that you can afford to lose your entire investment but that you’ll work like hell to break even and will be thrilled if you do. Don’t do it if you have to do it on the cheap.

Anne : I have a few more practical questions about the self-publishing process, but I’m going to save them until next time. Thanks, Mary, for sharing your insights!

Happy holidays, everyone, and keep up the good work!

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Ever since turning 40 a few years ago, Mary Hutchings Reed Mary has been trying to become harder to introduce, and, at 56, she finds she’s been succeeding. Her conventional resume includes both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Brown University (both completed within the same four years, and she still graduated Phi Beta Kappa), a law degree from Yale, and thirty-one years of practicing law, first with Sidley & Austin and then with Winston & Strawn, two of the largest firms in Chicago. She was a partner at both in the advertising, trademark, copyright, entertainment and sports law areas, and now is Of counsel to Winston, which gives her time to write, do community service and pursue hobbies such as golf, sailing, tennis, and bridge.

For many years, she has served on the boards of various nonprofit organizations, including American Civil Liberties
Union of Illinois, YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago, Off the Street Club and the Chicago Bar Foundation. She currently serves on the board of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago (and chair of its fundraising committee); Steel Beam Theatre, and her longest-standing service involvement, Lawyers for the Creative Arts.

Her current book, COURTING KATHLEEN HANNIGAN, is available on Amazon or directly from the author herself on her website.

So you’re considering self-publishing, part III: the nonfiction path

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For the past couple of days, I’ve been chatting with self-published authors Beren deMotier and Mary Hutchings Reed about the joys and trials of self-publishing. So far, the talk has been pretty marketing-oriented, but since I already had two such talented writers in my interviewing clutches, I couldn’t resist turning the talk to broader issues of writing and creativity.

I’m planning another post to share more of Mary and Beren’s marketing insights, of course, but as this particular is weekend ultra-busy for many people, I thought discussion of the more stressful aspects could wait until Monday. (Christmas eve shoppers aren’t going to have to time to read blogs, anyway, right?) And for these deeper topics, I felt a one-on-one discussion would serve our purposes better.

Today, I will be exploring the writing life in general and self-publishing in particular with Beren deMotier, the author of THE BRIDES OF MARCH. It’s a memoir, so we’re going to be talking about the peculiarities of nonfiction as well. To refresh everyone’s memory, here are the bright, shining faces of Beren and her book:

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In the interests of full disclosure: I did write a blurb for her book cover. That’s not entirely surprising, considering how we met: I had read her award-winning entry in a prestigious literary contest (rather sensibly, the Organization That Shall Not Be Named places copies of the winners and placers’ entries in the hallway for perusal), and when I later saw Beren’s name on her nametag, I stopped her in another hallway to tell her how impressed I was.

True story, honest. There are witnesses. I’m pretty enthusiastic about good writing.

Anne: Welcome back, Beren! You’re no stranger to the world of online communities, right? You’re a blogger yourself.

Beren: Yes, I write a blog blogs, as well as a Livejournal page more specifically about getting published.

Anne: I know that we’ve been talking obliquely about your book for a couple of days now, but as readers often join us in mid-series, pretend that we haven’t. Tell us what your book is about, please.

Beren: I wrote The Brides of March so that readers could ride with us on the roller coaster ride of getting a marriage license (after three kids and seventeen years together), literally running to the church in case of court injunction to get married while it was still legal, then celebrating with friends and family the wedding we’d never expected to experience, even while letters to the editor reviled us, signatures mounted for a constitutional amendment making darned sure no more same-sex marriages happened in Oregon, and nine months later, Oregon voters marked us as “unworthy” of marriage.

Anne: As we editors like to say, you were already a walking memoir. A wild story like yours probably wouldn’t have seemed plausible as fiction.

Beren: But there’s more! The state supreme court was debating whether our marriages were still legal, while the public debated our social status, and we debated whether moving to Canada was the best bet for equality when the 3000 same-sex marriages in Oregon (including ours) were declared null, void, and non-existent. All that wrapped in a slice-of-life memoir of life as a lesbian mom, just trying to get through the day on five Diet Cokes or less.

Anne: Agents often like to be told up front what popular book a potential client’s manuscript resembles, but I have to say, I would be hard-pressed to come up with a close parallel for yours. In my
mind, that’s a good selling point for a memoir, maybe even a great selling point. But since I know that not everyone agrees with me on that point, did the paucity of books on the subject make it harder for you to pitch this book to agents?

Beren: It was hard to make an elevator pitch—it certainly isn’t Marley & Me meets Find Me.

Anne: Although I can certainly imagine a misguided agent TRYING to pitch it that way, merely in order to compare it to a couple of bestsellers.

Beren: I came up with the line “A giddy leap through a legal window, straight onto the barbeque pit of public debate,” which about sums it up.

There were no parallel books, and that likely scared off publishers, who have to invest thousands in every book they take on. Keeping in mind that publishers have to put about sixty thousand dollars into each book they accept helped me not take rejections as personally.

Anne: That’s a very sane way to think of it. It’s SO easy to regard rejections as attacks upon one’s very being. But often, it’s simply a matter of the querier or submitter’s simply not giving the agent what she is expecting to see — or what some editor said over lunch last week, “Gee, you know what I would love to read right now? A book like X.”

Beren: I have read a lot of books about writing and pitching, but the best advice has come from agents at writing conferences, specifically the PNWA and Willamette writers conferences, who have told writers to do their research: don’t address letters “Dear Sir” when they are mailing queries to a predominantly female industry, for instance.

Anne: A fact of which many aspiring writers, particularly those querying US agencies from abroad, are not even aware. What other wisdom did you glean?

Beren: Know who takes on your kind of book and target those agents. Write a professional query letter with all the elements an editor or agent needs to know, including genre, length, your credentials and how to contact you.

The other advice I’ve heard that has helped is to remember that editors and agents are people—they may be trying to take care of business, but they are humans and fallible. If you are positive, polite and professional, you’ve just been a high point in their day, even if they can’t work on this project. Keep the door open for the next.

Anne: Oh, that’s SUCH good advice: SO much of the reaction they see from writers is hostile, understandably, and that makes trust harder for everybody. The industry is not very big, and an agent or editor who can’t take on today’s book may well be delighted with tomorrow’s. If I get a really thoughtful rejection, I send a thank-you note.

Since you were pitching a memoir — which, as so many aspiring memoirists apparently aren’t aware, is marketed like nonfiction, via a book proposal, not necessarily as fiction is, via the entire manuscript — I assume that every agent and editor you approached asked you immediately what your platform was. It’s such a hard question for a memoirist to answer, because obviously, each of us is the world’s best authority on our own life, but that’s not the kind of self-evident answer an agent or editor who asks the question wants to hear.

So how did you go about trying to convince them that you were the best person on earth to write this particular story?

Beren: Well, I certainly thought I was the best person on earth to write it! Not only was I there getting married in the moment, I’d had the experience of writing about same-sex marriage for over a decade (I think I’d published twelve columns about it), and had done the research to give it a political context as well as the personal. I’ve specialized in writing in a conversational voice; some have described the book as if a good friend was telling you the story while standing at the edge of a soccer field waiting for your kid. It is accessible.

Anne: That was one of the things that first drew me to the book: the voice was so much fun. Given how frustrating your experience was, it would have been very easy for the voice to become — I hate this term, because it so often applied to any woman with an opinion — strident. It reads as the voice of a very likable friend who gets swept up in larger forces — a great authorial choice for this story, I think.

Beren: From a professional point of view, the thing that made me the best to write it was having hundreds of articles published in newspapers, which gave me a decade to polish my style. I like to call it my apprenticeship. I had started publishing in national magazines, so that I had a built-in readership.

Also, I’d had my website up for quite some time, so it was easy to get a blog started and add a site for the book. One of my biggest personal achievements (besides birthing three babies without painkillers and learning to swim at 35), is to have built my own sites—I’m a terrible technophobe, but I was tired of my high tech industry spouse rolling her eyes at my inability to copy and paste, so I took it on and learned.

Anne: Since writers brand-new to querying and submission often don’t have publications to use in building their platforms, they often have to get a bit creative in coming up with credentials. In retrospect, what would you say was the best thing you ever did to boost your writing resume?

Beren: Contests. I won the Kay Snow Award for my first screenplay — and I would highly recommend learning how to write a screenplay for any kind of writing. Cynthia Whitcomb of Willamette Writers teaches courses, plus has two books out—one on writing screenplays, the other on selling them, that are fantastic.

That screenplay, a family comedy called Chaos, also made a final round in the Writer’s Digest annual screenplay contest, which is pretty good. The Brides of March took second place at the PNWA contest in 2006, and received Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards this fall.

The second thing I would say helped was having articles in print. The more you publish the more you can publish, since you have a track record of providing professional material. I worked with one editor on three different publications, which was wonderful, and those added up to writing for Curve magazine, which has a great circulation rate.

Anne: How long did it take you to write this book?

Beren: I started the book in March 2004, and thought I was finished the summer of 2006 and then added a couple more chapters that September.

Anne: That’s a pretty good clip for a memoir. Do you adhere to a regular writing schedule, or are you a wait-for-the-Muse-to-drop-by writer?

Beren: Most of the book was written in our Toyota Sienna minivan while the toddler was napping. I’d drive for about five minutes then park in front of the house and work on my laptop. If you are vigilant, it is amazing what you can get done.

Anne: I find that, too — once you learn to stop saying, “Oh, I have to leave in 20 minutes, so I can’t possibly write anything now,” you can find quite a bit of writing time in the midst of a packed day.

Beren: Having that regular time kept me going. Also, when there was something overwhelming to do, like a major edit or writing promotional copy, I sometimes checked into a hotel for a night or two and did nothing but write, eat, and sleep.

Anne: I do that, too; you actually don’t have to go far away to set up a great writing retreat. Sometimes, it’s as simple as just being where the people who usually need your attention are not for a short period of time. If I ran the universe, every writer would have staff to screen phone calls for her.

Do you take micro writing retreats often?

Beren: I probably did that about five times during the two and a half years before publication. Knowing that the time was designated for that purpose helped me focus. I would start writing at about 8 am, take a break at noon, then work until five, eat dinner, then work until about 11, then do it again the next day.

Anne: Did you run this manuscript past a critique group?

Beren: Writing groups don’t work for me. I’m too thin-skinned during the writing process, and freak out easily. It is better for me to hole up while writing than to share too soon.

Anne: I know a lot of writers who feel that way, but that can result in being even more thin-skinned when it comes time to receive feedback from agents and editors. I recall that you got some real lulus from agents and editors.

Beren: I had comments like “good writing, important story, can’t sell it,” and one editor told me she thought it wasn’t a book—maybe a screenplay?

I have a file with a list of all the agents and editors I contacted, and their letters. For a time I pasted them on the wall (my brother-in-law kindly told me it took 200 “nos” for one “yes”) but decided I didn’t want to focus on the negative. It is good to know I survived them, though, and kept writing and working on getting the book published.

Anne: It’s funny how one picks up habits, growing up in a writing family — we only learned recently that we share that background. The rejections posted above the desk was a familiar sight for a lot of us. Both Philip [K. Dick] and my mother favored it; it was fashionable as a motivational technique in the 1940s and 50s. My father was from an older generation of writers, and he thought it was a really bad idea; I guess that writers had enough bad news on their minds during the Great Depression.

I have to say, I’m with him: the last thing I want to see every time I sit down to work is a whole bunch of “NO!” staring at me.

Speaking of support systems, have your writer friends been supportive of your decision to self-publish? I have a very distinct recollection that my first reaction was to try to talk you out of it until I learned just how widely you had submitted the book.

Beren: Yes, they have been supportive, more than non-writer friends, who have a vision of the publishing world that doesn’t come close to reality, and have the understandable view of vanity publishing—there is the first reaction of “Oh!” to hearing you have a book out, but when they learn it is self-published, it changes to, “Ah.”

Anne: I know precisely the tone shift you mean. As if the publishing industry were motivated solely by book quality, so any difficulty landing an agent must necessarily be a commentary on writing quality. In real life, it just doesn’t work like that.

Beren: I’ve had several published authors tell me self-publication is the wave of the future, and the book became more “real” to doubting friends or relatives when it received reviews, when I was interviewed on the radio or did a reading. That made it a real book.

Anne: Ooh, that’s a distinction that drives me nuts — manuscripts are real, too; I hardly think that I imagine the piles of them in my office, or in my agent’s.

But back to the notion of self-publishing’s being the coming thing: it’s certainly becoming more and more respected. Especially with books not aimed at a mainstream market.

Beren: Gay & lesbian memoirs are often self-published, because there are so few outlets, and because we all have a story to tell. Because of the need to actually “come out” at some point, I think there is a greater willingness to put it all out there in writing, so there is a slew of self-published memoir and fiction by gay & lesbian writers. How the quality holds up, I don’t know, because I’ve been on a murder mystery bender for the last thirty years.

Anne: And yet in a lot of people’s minds, there is still a stigma automatically attached to a self-published book.

Beren: I think the stigma is still there; I know that I came into this with it hanging over my head. However, things are changing, especially since self-published manuals and specialty professional books have become so common. There are established examples of books that were self-published and great, so that makes people believe it could be the case with your book.

Blogging is certainly changing minds about the power of self-publishing, both by demystifying the writing and publishing process, and by making it clear that there is a LOT of competition for readership.

Anne: Hoo boy, yes. The publishing industry has been kind of slow to realize that — even now, a blogger often needs to be mentioned in the New York Times before she’s considered to have a viable audience, even if literally millions of people have been dropping by her blog regularly for a year or two.

What do you most wish you had known about self-publishing before you committed to it? Knowing what you know now, is there anything you would have done differently?

Beren: I wish I’d done it earlier, and not waited so long for a traditional publishing contract.

Anne: That’s interesting.

Beren: With such a current social topic, it would have been advantageous to get the book out sooner. But it is a big investment; sometimes it is hard to bring yourself to throw more time and money into a writing project when there has been no reward.

Self-publishing successfully takes lots of work — it is a leap of faith.

Also, I began querying agents and editors soon after starting it, but the book I pitched at them changed significantly during the writing; it began as a celebratory piece and ended up a roller coaster ride.

Anne: Was there anything about the process that completely surprised you, pleasantly or otherwise?

Beren:There is nothing like seeing your book on a bookstore or library shelf, and knowing it is being read. However it happens, it’s a miracle.

Anne: That seems like a pretty good note to end upon for today. Thanks, Beren!

And keep up the good work, everybody!

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Beren deMotier has written humor/social commentary for Curve, And Baby, Pride Parenting, Greenlight.com, www.ehow.com, as well as for GLBT newspapers across the nation. She’s written about same-sex marriage for over a decade, and couldn’t resist writing the bride’s eye view after marrying in Multnomah County. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her spouse of twenty-one years, their three children, and a Labrador the size of a small horse.

Her current book, THE BRIDES OF MARCH is available on Amazon and, for those of you who prefer to patronize independent bookstores, Powell’s.

Book marketing 101: scanning your query letter for problems, part V, or, the mythical perfect query letter

Today will be the next-to-last installment in my series on polishing your query letter to a high gloss. Later in the week, I will be moving on to crafting a Millicent-intriguing synopsis, completing our packets. And since I’ve only just noticed that it’s been an awfully long time since I’ve made a ceremonial visit to what a professional title page looks like, I shall probably take a run by that and estimating word count in the days to come as well.

I know, I know: not scintillating, perhaps, but definitely practical.

For the record, I don’t believe that there IS such a thing as a universally perfect query letter, one that will wow every agent currently hawking books on the planet. It is logically impossible: agents represent different kinds of books, for one thing, so the moment you mention that your book is a Gothic romance, it is going to be rejected by any agent who does not represent Gothic romances. Simple as that.

More fundamentally, though, I do not accept the idea of a magical formula that works in every case. Yes, the format I have been going over here tends to work well; it has a proven track record.

However — and I hate to tell you this, because the arbitrary forces of chance are hard to combat — even if it is precisely what your targeted agency’s screener has been told to seek amongst the haystack of queries flooding the mailroom, it might still end up in the reject pile if the screener or agent is having a bad day.

If the agent has just broken up with her husband of 15 years that morning, for instance, it’s probably not the best time to query her with a heartwarming romance. If she slipped on the stairs yesterday and broke both her wrists, she’s probably not going to be all that receptive to even the best knitting book today. And if he has just blistered his tongue by biting too quickly on a microwaved knish, it’s highly unlikely that any query is going to wow him within the next ten minutes, even if it were penned by William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and William Shakespeare in an unprecedented show of time-traveling collaboration.

No writer, however gifted, can win in such a situation.

My point is, there will always be aspects of querying success that you cannot control, and you will be a significantly happier writer in the long run if you accept that there is inevitably an element of luck involved.

Frankly, this took me quite a long time to accept myself. I once received a rejection from an agent who had hand-written, “This is literally the best query letter I have ever read — but I’ll have to pass” in the margins of my missive — as if that was going to make me feel any better about being rejected.

Frankly, it annoyed me far more than it pleased me, and like many writers, my mind flooded with resentful questions. Had the agent just completed a conference call with every editor in the business, wherein they held a referendum about the marketability of my type of novel, voting it down by an overwhelming margin? Had she suddenly decided not to represent the kind of book I was presenting due to a mystical revelation from the god of her choice? Or had the agent just gotten her foot run over by a backhoe, or just learned that she was pregnant, or decided to lay off half her staff due to budget problems?

Beats me; I’ll never know.

But the fact is, whatever was going on at that agency, it was beyond my control. Until I am promoted to minor deity, complete with smiting powers, love potions, and telepathic control of the mails, I just have to accept that I have no way of affecting when my query — or my manuscript, or my published book — is going to hit an agent, editor, reviewer, or reader’s desk.

My advice: concentrate on the aspects of the interaction you CAN control. Speaking of which, on to the checklist.

(11) Have I mentioned the book category?
I discussed this earlier in this series, in connection with your verbal pitch, but it bears repeating here: like it or not, you do need to use some of your precious querying space to state outright what KIND of a book you are shopping around.

The fact is, any agent will have to tell any editor what genre your book falls into in order to sell it: it is really, really helpful if you are clear about it up front.

You’d be surprised at how few query letters even mention whether the work being pitched is fiction or nonfiction — and how many describe the book in only the most nebulous of terms.

This is a business run on categories, people: pick one. Tell the nice agent where your book will be sitting in a bookstore, and do it in the language that people in the publishing industry use.

Since I posted on this fairly recently (see BOOK CATEGORIES, right), I shall not run through the categories again. If you’re in serious doubt about the proper term, dash to your nearest major bookstore, start pulling books similar to yours off the shelf in your chosen section, and look on the back cover: most publishers will list the book’s category either in the upper left-hand corner or in the box with the bar code.

Then replace the books tidily on the shelf, of course. (Had I mentioned that I’m a librarian’s daughter? I can prove it, too: Shhh!)

And if you’re absolutely, positively convinced that it would be an outrage upon the very name of truth to commit your novel to any one category, PLEASE don’t make up a hyphenate like Western-Fantasy-How-to, in order to try to nail it with scientific precision. In a pinch, if it doesn’t fall clearly into at least a general category, just label it FICTION and let the agent decide.

Provided, of course, that you are querying an agent who routinely represents fiction that does not fit neatly into any of the major established categories. I definitely wouldn’t advise this with, say, an agent who represents only romantica or hard-boiled mysteries.

But whatever you do, avoid cluttering up your query letter, synopsis — or indeed, any communication you may have with an agent or editor prior to clutching a signed contract with them in your hot little hand — with explanations about how your book transcends genre, shatters boundaries, or boldly goes where no novel has gone before. Even if it’s true.

Yes, such a speech makes a statement, but probably not the one the writer intends. Here’s how such statements translate into agent-speak: “This writer doesn’t know how books are marketed.”

(12) Have I listed my credentials well? Do I come across as a competent, professional writer, regardless of my educational level or awards won?

If you have any background that aided you in writing this book, you need to make sure you mention it in your query letter. Period. Even your camp trophy for woodworking can be a selling point, in the proper context. Ditto with any publication, anytime, anywhere, regardless of whether you were paid for writing it.

But truthfully, unless you are writing a book that requires very specific expertise, most of your credentials will not actually be relevant to your book. But do say where you went to school, if you did, and any awards you have won, if you have.

If you are a member of a regularly-meeting writers’ group, mention that, too: anything that makes you sound like a serious professional is appropriate to include. But if you don’t have anything you feel you can legitimately report here, don’t stretch the truth: just leave out this paragraph.

(13) Have I made any of the standard mistakes, the ones about which agents often complain?
I like to think of this as a primary reason to attend writers’ conferences regularly: they are one of the best places on earth to collect lists of the most recent agents and editors’ pet peeves. I’ve been going through most of the major ones throughout this series, but some of them can be quite itty-bitty.

Referring to your book as a fiction novel is invariably on the top of every agent’s list, for instance; in point of fact, all novels are fiction, by definition. A non-fiction memoir, a real-life memoir, and nonfiction based on a true story, as well as permutations on these themes, are all similarly redundant.

Waffling about the book category is also a popular choice, as are queries longer than a single page, including promotional blurbs from people of whom the agent has never heard (“Chester Smith says this is the most moving book about trout fishing he’s ever read!”), or ANY mention of the book’s potential for landing the author on Oprah. Any or all of these will generally result in the query being tossed aside, unread.

Especially the last; the average screener at a major NYC agency could easily wallpaper her third-floor walk-up in Brooklyn seven times over with query letters that make this claim — and I’m talking about ones received within a single month. Just don’t do it.

I shall be wrapping up the query checklist tomorrow, my friends, then it’s straight into the wilds of synopsis territory. Keep up the good work!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Alexandra wins, by the way.)

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

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

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

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

Keep up the good work!

Book marketing 101: query nuts and bolts

I realized after I posted last night (it’s amazing how conducive to self-criticism a truly uncomfortable hotel room can be) that although I had just urged you to send out queries to agents to whom you did not pitch at a conference — sometimes, it’s just not practicable, and it would be a shame if the shy were not able to reap any marketing advantage from conference attendance, right — I haven’t actually written a blog on how to put together a query letter since…could it have been as long ago as February?

Yet here I was, blithely sending those of you who have never done it before out into the tiger-filled woods with no guidance.

So it seems like a dandy time to run through query basics again. Actually, I wish writers talked amongst themselves about the nuts and bolts of querying more

Why? Well, although I know that my readers are too savvy to fall into the pitfalls of the average writer, the vast majority of query letters agents receive are either uncommunicative, petulant in tone, or just poor marketing.

We can do better than that, I think.

For those of you absolutely new to the process, a query letter is a 1-page (single-spaced) polite, formal inquiry sent out to an agent or editor in the hope of exciting professional interest.

It is not, contrary to popular practice, an occasion for either begging or boasting; you will want to come across as a friendly professional who has done her homework. (Or his, as the case may be.) A good query introduces the book and the author to a prospective agent in precisely the terms the industry would use to describe them.

This should sound familiar to those of you who have stuck with me all the way through Book Marketing 101: this was the purpose of the Magic First Hundred Words, wasn’t it?

And, like the hallway pitch, your goal here is not to make the agent fall down on the floor, foaming at the mouth and crying, “I will die if I do not sign this author immediately!” but to prompt a request to submit pages.

That’s a much less formidable goal, isn’t it?

How does one pull that off? By being businesslike without using business format (long-time readers, chant it with me now: documents without indented paragraphs appear illiterate to folks in the publishing industry).

There are a zillion guides out there, each giving ostensibly foolproof guidelines for how to construct a positively stellar query letter, but in my experience, simple works better than gimmicky. (Possibly because the former is rarer.) Typically, a query letter consists of five basic elements:

1. The opening paragraph, which includes the following information:

* A brief statement about why the writer is approaching this particular agent (Hint: be specific. “I enjoyed hearing you speak at Conference X,” “Since you so ably represent Author Q,” and “Since you are interested in (book category), I hope you will be intrigued by my book” all work better than not mentioning how you picked the agent in the first place.)

*The book’s title

*The book’s category (i.e., where your book would sit in Barnes & Noble. Most queries leave this off, but it’s essential. If you don’t know what this is, or are not sure where your book will fall, please see the BOOK CATEGORIES section at right).

*Word count. (Actually, I have never included this, because it makes many novels easier to reject right off the bat, but many agents like to have it up front. Because, you see, it makes it easier to reject so many queries off the bat. If your work falls within the normal word count for your genre – for most works of fiction, between 80,000 and 100,000 words – go ahead and include it. And if you don’t know how to estimate word count — most of the industry does not operate on actual word count — please see the WORD COUNT category at right.)

2. A paragraph pitching the book.

3. A BRIEF paragraph explaining for whom you have written this book (that’s the target market, mind you, not a paraphrase of your dedication page) and why this book might appeal to that demographic in a way that no other book currently on the market does. If the demographic is not especially well-known (or even if it is; agents tend to underestimate the size of potential groups of readers), go ahead and include numbers.

Don’t make the very common mistake, though, of having your book sound like a carbon copy of a current bestseller: you want to show here that your work is unique. If you can compare your book to another within the same genre that has sold well within the last five years, this is the place to do it, but make sure to make clear how your book serves the target market differently and better.

4. An optional paragraph giving your writing credentials and/or expertise that renders you the ideal person to have written this book — or, indeed, absolutely the only sentient being in the universe who could have. Actually, it’s not optional for NF, and it’s a good idea for everyone.

Include any past publications (paid or unpaid) in descending order of impressiveness, as well as any contest wins, places, shows, semi-finalist lists, etc., and academic degrees (yes, even if they are not relevant to your book).

If you have no credentials that may legitimately be listed here, omit this paragraph. However, give the matter some serious, creative thought first. If you have real-life experience that gives you a unique insight into your book’s topic, include it. (Again, it need not have been paid experience.) Or any public speaking experience – that’s actually a selling point for a writer, since so few have ever read in public before their first books have come out. Or ongoing membership in a writers’ group.

Anything can count, as long as it makes you look like a writer who is approaching the industry like a professional. Or like a person who would be interesting to know, read, and represent.

5. An EXTREMELY brief closing paragraph, thanking the agent for her time, mentioning any enclosed materials (synopsis, first five pages, whatever the agent lists as desired elements), calling the agent’s attention to the fact that you’ve sent a SASE, and giving your contact information, if it is not already listed at the top of the letter. (If you can’t afford to have letterhead printed up, just include your contact information, centered, in the header.) Say you look forward to hearing from her soon, and sign off.

There, that’s not so impossible in a single page, is it?

Before you tense up at the prospect, here’s the good news: if you have been prepping your pitch, you’ve already constructed most of the constituent parts of a professional-looking query letter.

Don’t believe me? Look at how the building blocks just snap together to make a log cabin:

Dear Ms./Mr. agent’s last name (NEVER just “Dear Agent”),
I enjoyed hearing you speak at the Martian Writers’ Conference. Not many New York-based agents take the time to come to Mars to meet the local writers; we really appreciate the ones who do.

Since you so ably represented BLUE-EYED VENUSIAN, I hope you will be interested in my book, {TITLE}. It is a {BOOK CATEGORY} that will appeal to {TARGET MARKET} because {#1 SELLING POINT}.

{ELEVATOR SPEECH}

I am uniquely qualified to tell this story, because {the rest of your SELLING POINTS, including any writing credentials}.

Thank you for your time in reviewing this, and I hope that the enclosed synopsis will pique your interest. I may be reached at the address and telephone number above, as well as via e-mail at {e-dress}. I enclose a SASE for your convenience, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

Aspiring Q. Author

You can do that without breaking a sweat, right?

Don’t worry; this structure isn’t my last word on the query, by any stretch of the imagination, but for today, I’m going to leave you to ponder the possibilities while I go and ponder this great big ocean that is casting buckets of light onto my typing hands. A big part of staying in this business for the long haul is knowing to pace oneself, after all.

Keep up the good work!

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

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

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

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

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

Agents and editors do not read like other people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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