The Decision to Self-Publish, by guest blogger D. Andrew McChesney

Hello, campers –

As promised, after so many weeks of concentrating on the practicalities of pitching and submission, I have a treat for you today — a guest post by self-publishing author, blogger, and all-around fab guy D. Andrew McChesney, better known around Author! Author! as thoughtful and incisive inveterate commenter Dave. He’s going to be talking about a matter I know has been dogging many members of our little community’s thoughts in the dead of night throughout these tough, tough days for first-time authors: how does a writer know when it’s time to self-publish?

I’m hoping it will engender some intriguing discussion. Before I introduce Dave and his book in more detail, though, allow me to say: wow, I’ve been stunned by the enthusiastic response to the Author! Author! Perfect Pitch Competition. The deadline isn’t until the end of the month (Friday, September 30 at midnight in your time zone, to be exact), but I guess the prospect of winning a free Mini Consult on one’s opening pages and marketing materials is a pretty strong incentive. I’m also going to be posting and critiquing the winners’ and placers’ keynotes, Hollywood hooks, elevator speeches, and formal pitches in this very forum in October, so we can talk about what does and does not work in formats that brief.

So keep those entries rolling in, everyone. I really am getting a kick out of seeing what my readers have been writing lately.

Did it seem as though my enthusiasm led me to digress for a moment? Actually, I wasn’t: if Dave’s name seems familiar to those of you who have been hanging out here for a while, but not haunting the comments, it’s probably because he took second place for adult fiction in last year’s Great First Page Made Even Better Competition and first place in the essay category of 2009′s Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence. He’s taken the time to amass quite a bit of what I like to call Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy.

In fact, I believe he commented on the post in which I first introduced the ECQLC concept. If memory serves, he made the first comment, even. But that’s not too surprising, as Dave was the very first commenter on Author! Author!, period, way back in the days when I was the Resident Writer for the Organization that Shall Not Be Named. (One of the reasons it shall not be named: despite my spending a year advocating vigorously for readers’ comments to be visible to everyone on that site — technically, the difference between a blog and a column — the organization refused.)

So it’s not too much of a stretch to say that Dave was the first member of the Author! Author! community; he’s certainly one of the thoughtful commenters who has helped it grow. (The How To… section of the archives was his idea, for instance.) He’s also, as a long-time member and current president of the Spokane Authors and Self-Publishers done more than his share to help other aspiring writers.

When he told me that he had decided to take his naval fantasy novel, Beyond the Ocean’s Edge, down the self-publishing path, then, I knew it had not been a light decision. This is a conscientious writer, one who had undoubtedly paid his dues — and had devoted the time to do something that surprisingly few writers considering self-publication do, talk with a wide array of authors who have already taken the self-publishing plunge.

Who better, then, to ask to talk about what factors went into that decision, as well as what he had learned? And who better to entice those of you who are considering or have already decided to self-publish into sharing your experiences, thoughts, hopes, and fears, as well as a little practical advice for those who will tread this relatively less-traveled path behind you?

My, that was a cumbersome sentence, but you get my drift. I want to engender some serious discussion of a topic that aspiring writers too seldom discuss in depth amongst themselves.

Those of you whose eyebrows hit your hairlines upon reading naval fantasy may already have figured out the other reason I thought Dave’s literary decisions might be interesting for us all to consider: this was definitely a hard book to categorize. Fantasy novels set on ships are not unheard-of, of course, but it’s hardly a well-established category. Here’s the blurb:

Hotchkiss continued on. “Ed! You didn’t see it?” The use of his captain’s first name on deck attested to the first lieutenant’s growing apprehension and maddening confusion.

“See what, Isaac, my old friend?” Pierce recognized his comrade’s state of mind and did not correct his lapse of quarterdeck etiquette. Clearly, a more personal and comfortable approach was needed.

“The stars! The stars, sir! We weren’t just looking up at ‘em. We were amongst them. There was the sea, and then there wasn’t. An’ the stars were below us as well! And we were there, right among them, like we were the stars themselves, or the moon, or. . .”

“I’m sure you saw what you’ve described. Unfortunately, I chanced not to see it, although I have had a strange feeling of timelessness.”

Is it possible to sail beyond the ocean’s edge to another world? In 1802, Royal Navy Lieutenant Edward Pierce is ashore on half-pay because of the Peace of Amiens. He fortunately gains command of a vessel searching for a lost, legendary island. When the island is found, Pierce and his shipmates discover that it exists in an entirely different but similar world. Exploring the seas around Stone Island, HMS Island Expedition sails headlong into an arena of mistaken identities, violent naval battles, strange truces, dangerous liaisons, international intrigue, superstition, and ancient prophecies.

Quick: on which shelf would you expect to find this in a brick-and-mortar bookstore? Many a Millicent, I’m sure, has scratched her head sore over that particular problem.

So let’s see what goes into the thought process of a writer professional enough to learn the ropes of traditional publishing — and then decided not to climb them. Take it away, Dave!

If I seem familiar to followers of Anne’s blog, I have it on good authority that I was the first to post a question in the days before Author! Author! existed as it does now. Over the years, the tone of my remarks should indicate that I sought publication by the traditional route. Why then have I recently charted a new course towards self-publishing?

When I finished my initial draft and realized that I might have something others would like to read, I knew nothing about getting published. Boxing up the manuscript, sending it to a publisher, and saying, “here’s my book, print it and send me the money!” didn’t seem to be the way to go about it. Serious about getting my work on the market, I bought the appropriately named Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published. I learned about literary agents, query letters and pitches. I discovered acquisition editors and editorial boards. I found that manuscripts had to survive a long road of competition and a process of elimination on the way to becoming published books.
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Dangerously armed with a little knowledge, I set out to become a published author, only to discover the trail is longer, steeper, and more crooked than it seems. Writers groups, either informal gatherings or large regional organizations, smoothed many of the bumps. Online advice columns such as Author! Author! straightened the curves as I came to better understand the publishing industry. My query letters improved and I saw positive results as I sent more out. Increasingly those queries resulted in a request for pages or occasionally the entire manuscript. I attended conferences, soaked up inspiration from guest speakers, and pitched my book to attending agents.

Looking back, could I have been more diligent in my querying? There is always that unanswered question of the next query being the one that would have landed me an agent. Still, I sent out a mass of query letters over the years, even while narrowing my search parameters for agents who would possibly be interested. Of those agents who represented work most like mine, many were no longer taking on new writers. While I didn’t send as many queries or pitch as often as some, I sent enough to realize that traditional publication may not be meant for me.

I looked at independent presses, having heard that many leaned more towards the writing itself instead of the work’s money making potential. Yet a great many of them seemed to focus on writers from a certain geographic area or in specific genres. I did find a few that might be a fit for my work, and a couple even expressed a return interest. As luck would have it, nothing came about as a result of those submissions either.

I’ve been a member of Spokane Authors and Self-Publishers since first setting out on the road to publication. Primarily I joined to associate with other writers and had no thought of self-publishing. Bad things about self-publishing still emanated from many in the traditional industry. Writers opted to self-publish because their work was not good enough to be published in the regular way. Self-publishers refused to learn and work within the industry.

Having read several self-published books, I strongly assert the first assumption is wrong. Dealing with the industry for several years to no avail, I believe the second idea is not factual either.

Still, self-publishing has drawbacks, including the writer paying to be published. Being (among other things) of Scottish ancestry, I am stereotypically cheap. I’d much rather see a big publisher pay to have my book printed and distributed than have the funds come out of my pocket. I did not warm to boxes of books cluttering up my basement and carting cartons around in my car trying to sell them at flea markets and swap meets.

But the face of self-publishing is changing with time. Recently, several firms have come into being which remove many of the traditional roadblocks associated with self-publishing.

In every unpublished writer’s life, a time comes when having one’s book out there, on the market, is more important than how it got there. As 2011 began, I came as close to making a New Year’s Resolution as I ever have. Come the Fourth of July, if I did not have a valid offer of representation or any express interest in publishing my book, I would do it myself. While I could have started to self-publish then, I wanted to allow an agent and an independent publisher looking at the work time to respond. I had also just queried another independent publisher whose submission window had just opened up and wanted time to see what might develop.

As Independence Day approached, I had not had any response from the agent and first independent publisher. Once fulfilling a request for pages from the second publisher, I had had no further correspondence. Thus, on the Fourth of July, I determined that I would indeed self-publish Beyond the Ocean’s Edge. A week later, I signed up with a self–publishing service company.

The next time Anne invites me to visit Author! Author! I’ll talk about some of the other factors that led to the decision to self-publish. Somewhat entangled therein is the process of figuring out which self-publishing service company I would choose to work with. I might also detail the process involved since signing on with that company and the progress we have made to this point.

Following a US Navy career, D. Andrew McChesney continues a passionate interest in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century naval history. Long fascinated with USS Constitution, Dave was aboard “Old Ironsides” for a turn-around cruise in Boston Harbor. Touring HMS Victory in Portsmouth, England provides further inspiration as he crafts the Stone Island Sea Stories, a naval adventure series having fantasy elements. Beyond the Ocean’s Edge and Sailing Dangerous Waters are complete, while work continues on Darnahsian Pirates.

Dave spent his early childhood on a homestead forty-one miles outside Fairbanks, Alaska. In the lower forty-eight, television series such as Walt Disney’s The Swamp Fox kindled an interest in history ranging from the American Revolution through the War of 1812. Fascination with the later conflict grew when his grandfather gave him a drawing of Constitution made during the frigate’s visit to Puget Sound in the 1930s. Discovery of C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower in high school solidified Dave’s interest in that era’s naval history.

He edits the Rear Engine Review, the Inland Northwest Corvair Club’s monthly newsletter. His essay, Tennis Balls and Broadsides won first place in the initial Author! Author! Periodic Awards for Expressive Excellence, and was published in Gray Dog Press’ Spoke Write. Sailing Dangerous Waters garnered second place in the Author! Author! Great First Pages Contest. Dave is President of Spokane Authors and Self Publishers (SASP), and a member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association (PNWA).

He resides in Spokane, Washington with his wife Eva, daughter Jessica, a Quaker Parrot named He-lo, a corn snake called Teako, a 1962 Corvair Rampside pickup known as Tim, and a 1965 Corvair Monza coupe identified as Ralph. Patiently waiting to win the lotto or for his book(s) to become best sellers, Dave works in janitorial services with a local private club.

The mysteriously mysterious strictures of standard format, part VIII: but I see it done in published books all the time!

Seattle moss

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m a big fan of artists’ looking at ordinary, everyday things and showing us the beauty of them. Take the photograph above, for instance: that’s perfectly ordinary moss on a perfectly ordinary concrete wall, photographed during a perfectly ordinary Seattle rainstorm. (And while I was clicking away, crunching my body sideways in order to get this particular shot, a perfectly ordinary mother told her perfectly ordinary wee daughter to veer away from the crazy lady. Yet another case of a misunderstood artist — and another a child being warned that if she tries to look at something from an unusual perspective, people are bound to think she’s strange.)

Perhaps not astonishingly, writers tend to find beauty in found words. An overhead scrap of conversation, perhaps, or a favorite phrase in a book. And often — far too often, from Millicent the agency screener’s perspective — aspiring writers celebrate these words lifted from other places by quoting them at the beginning of their manuscripts.

That’s right, campers: today, I’m going to be talking about proper formatting for that extremely common opening-of-text decoration, the epigraph.

You know, those nifty little quotes from other sources that we writers so adore — and it’s not as though the publishing industry doesn’t encourage us to think of them this way: in a published book, the epigraph, if any, is almost always presented in a place of honor, either at the top of each chapter or by itself on the page before the text proper starts. Take, for example, the placement of the well-known epigraph to Alice Walker’s THE COLOR PURPLE, an excerpt from Stevie Wonder’s DO LIKE YOU:

The color purple's epigraph

Okay, so that picture didn’t really do the words justice; not all of my photos can be winners, you know. (In case you don’t happen to have a copy of the book handy, the epigraph runs thus: Show me how to do like you/Show me how to do it.) It does, however, show the prominent placement the epigraph affords: even in my cheap, well-worn paperback edition, it scores a page all to itself.

In other words, not only is it allocated space; it’s allocated white space, to set it off from the other text. In an age when acknowledgments pages are routinely omitted, along with the second spaces after periods and colons, in order to save paper, that is quite an honor. Especially since nobody but writers like epigraphs much — of that, more later.

But we writers think they’re great, don’t we? Especially if they’re from obscure sources; they feel so literary, don’t they? Or deep-in-the-national-psyche, know-your-Everyman populist, if they’re from songs. By evoking the echo of another writer’s words, be it an author’s or a songwriter’s, we use them to set the tone for the story to come.

I don’t think conceptual aptness is all there is to the appeal, though. There is something powerfully ritualistic about typing the words of a favorite author at the beginning of our manuscripts; it’s a way that we can not only show that we are literate, but that by writing a book, we are joining some pretty exalted company.

Feeling that way about the little dears, I truly hate to mention this, but here goes: it’s a waste of ink to include them in a submission. 99.9998% of the time, they will not be read at all.

Stop glaring at me; it’s not my fault. I don’t stand over Millicent with a bullhorn, admonishing her to treat every syllable of every submission with respect. (Although admittedly, it’s an interesting idea.)

The sad fact is, most Millicents are specifically trained not to read epigraphs in manuscripts; it’s widely considered a waste of time. I’ve literally never met a professional reader who doesn’t simply skip epigraphs in a first read — or (brace yourselves, italics-lovers) any other italicized paragraph or two at the very beginning of a manuscript, even if it was .

Oh, dear — I told you to brace yourselves. “Why on earth,” italics-lovers the world over gasp in aghast unison, “would any literature-loving human do such a thing? Published books open all the time with italicized bits!”

A fair question — but actually, there’s a pretty fair answer. Most Millicents just assume, often not entirely without justification, that if it’s in italics, it doesn’t really have much to do with the story at hand, which (they conclude, not always wrongly) begins with the first line of plain text.

Of course, there’s another reason that they tend to skip ‘em, a lot less fair: at the submission stage of the game, no one cares who a writer’s favorite authors are. A writer’s reading habits, while undoubtedly influential in developing his personal voice, are properly the subject of post-publication interviews, not manuscript pre-screening time. After all, it’s not as though Millicent can walk into her boss’ office and say, “Look, I think you should read this submission, rather than that one, because Writer A has really terrific literary taste,” can she?

Whichever reason most appeals to the Millicent who happens to have your submission lingering on her desk (just under that too-hot latte she’s always sipping, no doubt), she’s just not going to be reading your carefully-chosen epigraph. She feels good about this choice, too.

Why? Well, the official justification for this practice — yes, there is one to which Millicents will admit in public — is not only reasonable, but even noble-sounding: even the busiest person at an agency or publishing house picks up a submission in order to read its author’s writing, not somebody else’s.

Kinda hard to fault them for feeling that way, isn’t it, since we all want them to notice the individual brilliance of our respective work?

Sentiment aside, let’s look at what including an epigraph achieves on a practical level, as well as its strategic liabilities. Assume for a moment that you have selected the perfect quotation to open your story. Even better than that, it’s gleaned from an author that readers in your chosen book category already know and respect. By picking that quote, you’re announcing from page 1 — or before page 1, if you allocate it its own page in your manuscript — you’re telling Millicent that not only are you well-read in your book category, but you’re ready and able to take your place amongst its best authors.

Sounds plausible from a writerly perspective, doesn’t it? That’s one hard-working little quote.

But what happens when Millicent first claps eyes on your epigraph? Instead of startling her with your erudition in picking such a great quote, the epigraph will to prompt her to start skimming before she gets to the first line of your text — AND you will have made her wonder if you realized that manuscript format and book format are not the same.

So you tell me: was including it a good idea? Or the worst marketing notion since New Coke?

If that all that hasn’t convinced you, try this on for size: while individual readers are free to transcribe extracts to their hearts’ contents, the issue of reproducing words published elsewhere is significantly more problematic for a publishing house. While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, reproduction of published text without the author’s permission is known in the biz by another, less flattering name: copyright infringement.

What does that mean in practice? Well, if the epigraph is from a book that is not in the public domain, the publisher will need to obtain explicit permission to use any quote longer than fifty words. Ditto for any quote from a song that isn’t in the public domain, even if it is just a line or two.

So effectively, most epigraphs in manuscripts might as well be signposts shouting to an editor: “Here is extra work for you, buddy, if you buy this book! You’re welcome!”

I’m sensing some disgruntlement out there, amn’t I? “But Anne,” I hear some epigraph-huggers cry,
“the material I’m quoting at the opening of the book is absolutely vital! The book simply isn’t comprehensible without it!”

Before I respond, let me ask a follow-up question: do you mean that it is crucial to the reader’s understanding the story, or that you have your heart set on that particular quote’s opening this book when it’s published?

If it’s the latter, including the epigraph in your manuscript is absolutely the wrong way to go about making that dream come true. Like any other book formatting issue, whether to include an epigraph — or acknowledgements, or a dedication — is up to the editor, not the author. And besides, a submission manuscript should not look like a published book.

Consequently, the right time to place your desired epigraph under professional eyes is after the publisher has acquired the book, not before. You may well be able to argue successfully for including that magically appropriate quote, if you broach the subject at the right time.

And just to set my trouble-borrowing mind at ease: you do know better than to include either acknowledgements or a dedication in your manuscript submissions, right? It’s for precisely the same reason: whether they’ll end up in the published book is the editor’s call. (I wouldn’t advise getting your hopes up, though: in these paper-conserving days, the answer is usually no on both counts, at least for a first book.)

Quite a few of you were beaming virtuously throughout those last three paragraphs, though, weren’t you? “I know better than to second-guess an editor,” you stalwart souls announce proudly. “I honestly meant what I said: my opening quote is 100% essential to any reader, including Millicent and her cohorts, understanding my work.”

Okay, if you insist, I’ll run through the right and wrong ways to slip an epigraph into a manuscript — but bear in mind that I can’t promise that even the snazziest presentation will cajole Millicent into doing anything but skipping that quote you love so much. Agreed?

For starters, do not, under any circumstances, include a quote on the title page as an epigraph — which is what submitters are most likely to do, alas. Let’s take a gander at what their title pages tend to look like:

Does that leave you wondering Millicent will notice the quote at all, much less find it obnoxious? I’m guessing she will, because this is was what she was expecting to see:

Actually, that was sort of a red herring — that wasn’t precisely what she expected. Pop quiz: did you catch the vital piece of information he left off his title page?

If you said that Eeyore neglected to include the book category on the second example, award yourself a pile of thistles. (Hey, that’s what he would have given you.) His title page should have looked like this:

Eeyore good title

And yes, I am going to keep showing you properly-formatted title pages until you start seeing them in your sleep; why do you ask? Take a moment to compare the third example with the first: the quote in the first example is going to stand out to Millicent like the nail in a certain critter’s tail, isn’t it?

Other submitters choose to eschew the title page route in order to place an epigraph on the first page of text. The result is immensely cluttered, by anyone’s standards — especially if the submitter has made the very common mistake I mentioned in my discussion of title pages last time, omitting the title page altogether and cramming all of its information onto page 1:

Where did all of our lovely white space go? Into quoting, partially.

The last popular but ill-advised way to include an introductory epigraph is to place it on a page all by itself in the manuscript, between the title page and the first page of text. In other words, as it might appear in a published book:

What’s wrong with this, other than the fact that Poe died before our boy D.H. wrote Sons and Lovers? Chant it with me now, everyone: a manuscript is not supposed to look just like a published book; it has its own proper format.

At best, Millicent is likely to huffily turn past this page unread. At worst, she’s going to think, “Oh, no, not another writer who doesn’t know how to format a manuscript properly. I’ll bet that when I turn to page one, it’s going to be rife with terrible errors.” Does either outcome sound especially desirable to you?

I thought not. So what should an epigraph-insistent submitter do?

Leave it out, of course — weren’t you listening before?

But if it is absolutely artistically necessary to include it, our pal Mssr. Poe actually wasn’t all that far off: all he really did wrong here was include a slug line. The best way to include an introductory epigraph is on an unnumbered page PRIOR to page 1. On that unnumbered page, it should begin 12 lines down and be centered. But I’m not going to show you an example of that.

Why? Because I really, truly would advise against including an epigraph at all at the submission stage. Just in case I hadn’t made that clear.

That doesn’t mean you should abandon the idea of epigraphs altogether, however. Squirrel all of those marvelous quotes away until after you’ve sold the book to a publisher — then wow your editor with your erudition and taste. “My,” the editor will say, “this writer has spent a whole lot of time scribbling down other authors’ words.”

Or, if you can’t wait that long, land an agent first and wow her with your erudition and taste. But don’t be surprised if she strongly advises you to keep those quotation marks to yourself for the time being. After all, she will want the editor of her dreams to be reading your writing, not anyone else’s, right?

If you are submitting directly to a small press, do be aware that most publishing houses now place the responsibility for obtaining the necessary rights squarely upon the author. If you include epigraphs, editors at these houses will simply assume that you have already obtained permission to use them. Ditto with self-publishing presses.

This expectation covers, incidentally, quotes from song lyrics, regardless of length.

I’m quite serious about this. If you want to use a lyric from a song that is not yet in the public domain, it is generally the author’s responsibility to get permission to use it — and while for other writing, a quote of less than 50 consecutive words is considered fair use, ANY excerpt from an owned song usually requires specific permission, at least in North America. Contact the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) for assistance in making such requests. (For a very funny first-hand view of just what a nightmare this process can be, please see FAAB Joel Derfner’s guest post on the subject.)

Have I talked you out of including an epigraph yet — particularly an excerpt from a copyrighted song, like Alice Walker’s? I hope so.

I know that it hurts to cut your favorite quote from your manuscript, but take comfort in the fact that at the submission stage, no cut is permanent. Just because you do not include your cherished quotes in your submission does not mean that they cannot be in the book as it is ultimately published.

Contrary to what 99% of aspiring writers believe, a manuscript is a draft, not a finished work. In actuality, nothing in a manuscript is unchangeable until the book is actually printed — and folks in the industry make editing requests accordingly.

In other words, you can always negotiate with your editor after the book is sold about including epigraphs. After you have worked out the permissions issue, of course.

There’s nothing like a good practical example to clarify things, is there? More follow next time. Keep noticing the beauty in the everyday, everybody, and keep up the good work!

The getting-a-book-published basics, part XIV: and then there are the alternate — dare I say more scenic? — routes

to the village center

We’re nearing the end of our crash course on how manuscripts do — and don’t — move from the writer’s fingertips to publication, you’ll be glad to hear. And boy, have we covered a lot of territory over the last few weeks! Admittedly, I could conceivably have guided you over this trail with a somewhat speedier step, dwelling a bit less on the important details, but I consider a working knowledge of how the publishing industry in general, and agencies in particular, function an absolutely essential prerequisite for any aspiring writer intending to market her work.

If by some chance I hadn’t already made that abundantly clear. If I had my way, every writers’ association in the English-speaking world would regularly offer free weekend seminars on this stuff, to discourage any talented writer from walking into the querying and submission process blind.

Heck, I’d love to see this information taught in high schools, along with the basics of standard manuscript format. Now that would be one great English composition course.

Glancing back through the posts in this series, I was reminded of the old joke about the reporter interviewing the famous college professor about how long it typically takes him to write a half-hour lecture.

“Oh, all day,” the professor says, “if it’s a topic I’ve never lectured on before. Sometimes several days. Even a week, if I need to do background research.”

The reporter is awfully impressed at that level of dedication. “Wow, that’s a lot of work. How long to write an hour-long lecture on the same topic?”

The professor shrugs. “About three hours.”

The reporter wonders if the professor misunderstood the question, but after all, this is a learned man; no need to insult his intelligence. Slyly, he asks, “Well, how long would it take you to prepare a three-hour lecture, then?”

The professor smiles. “Would you like me to start right now?”

I suspect that I was reminded of this joke because I couldn’t help noticing that most of the posts in this series are approximately the length of my usual notes for an hour-long lecture, factoring in time for digression and questions — you can take the professor away from the rostrum, but not the rostrum out of the professor’s mind, apparently. But there’s more to it than that: I also believe that there’s a vital lesson here for those who are used to receiving their information about getting published in the kind of sound bites one hears the pros spouting at writers’ conferences and online.

It’s this: while brief, snappy advice may seem simpler, it’s actually significantly harder to produce, at least if it’s done thoughtfully. Unless, of course, the advice-giver is merely parroting the conventional wisdom on the subject, often expressed in dismissive one- or two- sentence bursts. Or as single-page, bullet-pointed to-do lists cribbed from a handout from another conference lecture or website.

Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it’s hardly best tool for explanation.

Trying to follow sound-bite advice is rather like gnawing on cubes of bouillon instead of drinking broth: the two substances may well contain the same ingredients, but it’s certainly easier to digest in the watered-down form. Particularly when, as is often the case for advice aimed at writers, the prevailing aphorisms are deceptively simple.

That’s why it’s both difficult and profoundly important for aspiring writers to come to understand that the much prevailing wisdom you hear glibly passing from mouth to mouth is the bouillon version, not the broth itself.

And frankly, the easy availability of bouillon can lead good writers astray. The combination of those over-concentrated pieces of advice that every writer has heard — the full range from basic writing tips like write what you know and show, don’t tell to the types of things agents and editors like to say at writers’ conferences like good writing will always find a home and it all depends on the writing — with the flat-out wrong popular conception that any genuinely good book will automatically find a publisher instantly can (and frequently does, alas) prompt an aspiring writer to conclude, wrongly, that the process should be easy for a genuinely marketable book. Because all that’s necessary to land an agent and/or editor is to have talent, right? So why bother to learn how to format the manuscript professionally, or to figure out the book category, or even to proofread? Isn’t it the agent and editor’s job to ferret out talent despite how it’s presented?

Um, no. It’s their job to discover writers who can reliably produce marketable prose, adhere to industry standards, and have talent. Even then, the writer’s going to have to take direction well.

Other aspiring writers who have imbibed the bouillon assume that if their manuscripts don’t get picked up right away at the query stage, the problem must be in the quality of the writing. If true talent always gets spotted, then why even speculate that an unprofessional query letter might be the culprit?

These conclusions are completely understandable, of course: it’s what the truisms have taught many aspiring writers to believe. But they are not the whole story, any more than a packet of bouillon is a vat of delicious soup.

Some of you are scratching your heads, aren’t you? “Hmm,” you muse, “is Anne being profound, or is she merely hungry?”

A little of both, I expect. Yet because I have dropped so much potentially quite intimidating information about how books typically get published upon all of you so quickly, I would imagine that the comparatively simple standard aphorisms might be sounding pretty good right about now. Just the facts, ma’am.

I could bore you all at this juncture with some ennobling platitudes about knowledge being power and valuable for its own sake — see my earlier comment about the difficulty of taking the professor out of the girl — but I’m not going to do that. Anyone with the dedication to have plowed through this, let’s face it, often-depressing series doesn’t need that pep talk. You’re all bright enough, I’m sure, to have picked up from my SUBTLE HINTS throughout this series that the archive list at right is so extensively categorized precisely so my readers may find answers to specific practical questions as they come up.

Instead, allow me to suggest something the bouillon-mongers seldom remember to mention: the primary reason that it often takes even excellent manuscripts quite a long time to find agents and a home with a major publisher is that this process is hard.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably either trying to promote a book or classes on how to get published — or is attempting to encourage all of the discouraged good writers out there to keep on going in the face of some pretty steep odds. Here’s an aphorism that you’re unlikely to hear at a writers’ conference that is nevertheless true: most aspiring writers give up on finding a home for their manuscripts too quickly.

Given how deeply affected by mercurial market fads agents’ and editors’ choices necessarily are, that’s truly a shame. Especially right now, when the economy is forcing the major publishing houses to be even more cautious than usual in what they acquire.

At the risk of repeating myself: hang in there. To recycle some bouillon of my own, the manuscript that gets rejected today may well not be the one that will get rejected a year or two from now.

But some of you may not be willing to wait that long to see your books in print. This, too, is completely understandable: contrary to what agents often seem to believe, most aspiring writers care more about having their writing available for others to read than about making scads of money on the deal.

Although a few wheelbarrows full of money would be nice, of course.

Which is why — to return to yesterday’s topic — it might make perfect sense to an agent to set aside a manuscript that he professes to love if it doesn’t elicit a fairly lucrative offer in its first circulation, in favor of marketing a client’s next book. In the agent’s mind, the first book hasn’t been discarded; it’s merely waiting to be part of a future multi-book deal.

Seriously, it happens all the time. If an agent thinks a writer has a voice that might hit it big someday, continuing to market that first manuscript to smaller or regional presses might seem like a bad career move, even though going with a smaller press might bring the book into print years earlier. (If these last two paragraphs sound like gibberish to you, you might want to go back and re-read the earlier posts in this series.)

Obviously, this is not necessarily logic that would make sense to a frustrated writer, particularly one who may have spent years and years landing that agent. Heck, even the expectation that there would be a second book ready to go by the time a handful of editors at big publishing houses have had a chance to take a gander at the first would make a lot of aspiring writers turn pale.

If not actually lose their respective lunches. Especially a writer who might have only intended to write one book in the first place.

Authoring only one book is a publishing strategy that often appeals to aspiring writers, particularly memoirists: you have a story to tell, and you tell it. Done. But that’s a career strategy that might not even occur to an agent excited by a new author’s voice.

There’s a reason that “So, what’s your next book?” is such a common question before the ink is dry on the representation contract, after all. Since even authors whose books are released by major publishers seldom make enough to quit their day jobs — remember, few books are bestsellers, by definition — agents tend to be on the lookout for career writers, ones ready, able, and eager to keep launching fine books into the marketplace. From their perspective, planning to write several marketable books is simply very good career sense for a writer who wants to make a living at it.

But that’s not every aspiring writer’s goal, is it? Is it?

Okay, so it is for a whole lot of aspiring writers. But if getting that first — and possibly only — book into print is a writer’s highest priority, investing a great deal of time and energy in landing an agent might not seem like a reasonable trade-off.

And that’s not the only reason a reasonable writer might have qualms about pursuing the standard major publisher route, either. Some might balk at all of the hoops through which large or mid-sized publishers expect first-time authors to leap, up to and including landing an agent first, for instance, or not be too thrilled about the prospect of an agent’s insisting upon changes to the manuscript in order to render it more marketable to the majors. Still others might feel, and rightly, that the time for their books to reach readers is now, not some dim, uncertain time several years hence.

The good news is that, contrary to the underlying assumptions of the bouillon trade, writers do have options other than the big publisher route. And I imagine those of you who have spent much of this series muttering, “Oh, God, NO!” will be overjoyed to hear that a great deal of what I’ve said so far will not apply to the next two sub-topics on our publishing hit parade: publishing through a small house and self-publishing.

No need to conceal your joy; I know, I know.

The small publishing house
Also known as an independent publisher because they are not affiliated with any of the major publishing houses (as imprints are), small presses are often willing to work with authors directly, rather than insisting upon receiving submissions only through agents. Typically, indie houses offer relatively small advances — or sometimes no advance at all — but that’s a calculated risk for an author. Sometimes, it can pay off big time: in recent years, some of the most exciting new fiction has started its printed life at a small press and gotten picked up later by a major publisher.

And because some of you will be able to think of nothing else until I answer the question you just mentally screamed two sentences ago, a writer should approach a small publisher precisely as one does an agent: after having done some research on who publishes what, find out how they prefer to be approached, and send a query.

In other words: as with an agency, it’s never a good idea to send unsolicited manuscripts. Ask first.

By the same token, it’s just as important to do a little research on an indie publisher as on an agent. A well-stocked bookstore is a great place to start; see who is bringing out books like yours these days. Both the Herman Guide and Writer’s Market have good listings of reputable small publishers. So does Preditors and Editors, a fine source for double-checking that the press whose website looks so appealing is in fact a traditional publisher, and not a printer of self-published books for pay.

Hey, you’d be surprised at how often their websites look similar.

I cannot stress sufficiently how important it is to doing your homework, and not merely to avoid being presented with a printing bill. Many an aspiring writer has wasted time and resources approaching a major house’s imprint in the mistaken impression that it’s an independent press, ending up summarily rejected.

How can a savvy writer tell which is which? Check the copyright page of a published book — you know, the one on the flip side of the title page — to see if the press that produced it is an indie or an imprint of a larger house. If it’s affiliated with a major, the copyright page will say.

Select a small press that has a track record of publishing books like yours before you approach. Rather than publishing across a wide variety of book categories, the smaller publishing house tends to specialize. This often turns out to be a plus for authors, as targeting a narrow market often means that a small press can afford to take more chances in what it acquires.

Why can they afford to take more chances, you ask with bated breath? Generally speaking, because their print runs are smaller and they spend less on promotion. And remember how I was telling you that their advances were usually small or non-existent?

Another cost-cutting move: the author usually ends up arranging — and financing the book tour himself. If, indeed, there are public readings at all. (For some useful tips on posts about how writers can set up their own readings, check out the guest posts by FAAB Michael Schein beginning here.)

In fact, over the last couple of years, it’s gotten downright common for small publishers, especially those who market primarily online, to employ the print-on-demand (POD) method, rather than producing a large initial print run, as the major houses do, and placing it in bookstores. (For an explanation of how print-on-demand works, please see the aptly-named PRINT ON DEMAND category on the archive list at right. Hey, I told you that the archive list was broken down into very specific topics!)

Check about this in advance, because POD carries some definite marketing drawbacks: POD books have an infinitely more difficult time getting reviewed (check out the GETTING A BOOK REVIEWED category for more details), and most US libraries have strict policies against buying POD books. So do some bookstore chains that shall remain nameless. (They know who they are!) Even some online retailers won’t carry POD books.

Why, you exclaim in horror? Well, for a lot of reasons, but mostly for because POD still carries a certain stigma; many, many bookbuyers who should know better by now still regard POD as the inevitable marker of a self-published book.

More on why that impression might present marketing problems follows next time. For now, what you need to know is that a small publisher that does not go the POD route is going to have an easier time placing your book on shelves and into the hands of your future readers.

Just something to keep in mind when you’re rank-ordering your list of indie publishers for querying purposes.

On the bright side, an author often has significantly more input into the publication process at a small press than a large one. Because it is a less departmentalized operation than a major publishing house, editors at indie presses often have the time to work more intensively with their authors. For a first-time author who gets picked up by a really good editor who genuinely loves the book, this can be a very positive experience.

It can also, perversely, render an author more attractive to agents and editors at the majors when he’s trying to market his next book. (Since indie presses seldom have much money to toss around, multi-book contracts are rare; see that earlier comment about miniscule advances.) A recommendation from an editor will give you a definite advantage in the querying stage for book #2: a query beginning, Editor Y of Small Publisher X recommended that I contact you about representing my book… is probably going to get a pretty close reading from any agent’s Millicent.

Why? Well, having a successful track record of pleasing an editor at an indie press is a selling point; I tremble to report it, but not all authors are equally receptive to editorial commentary. Also, from an agent’s point of view, the fact that there is already an editor at a press out there who is predisposed to read and admire your work automatically means her job will be easier — if the majors pass on book #2, the editor who worked on book #1 probably will not.

Which is to say: if your first book with a small press does well, they will probably want you to stick around — and might even become a trifle defensive if you start looking for an agent for book #2, especially if it is a press that ONLY works with unagented authors, or who prefers to do so. (Such presses are rare, but they do exist; it is undoubtedly cheaper to work with unagented writers — again, see that earlier comment about advances.)

Don’t be scared off by a presumption that signing with them would that you’re committing to a lifetime relationship. It doesn’t. Small publishers are aware their authors may HAVE to leave them in order to pursue larger markets. Consequently, they expect it. Also, people who work for small presses also understand that it’s not at all unheard-of for a writer to start out at a small press and move up to a big one with the help of an agent.

Actually, the more successful they are at promoting your first book, the more they could logically expect you to move onward and upward. Authors move from press to press all the time, without any hard feelings, and when well-meaning industry professionals genuinely respect an author, the last thing they want to do is to harm their future books’ chances of commercial success. In fact, if your subsequent books do well, the small press will benefit, because new readers will come looking for copies of your first book.

Everybody wins, in short.

That being said, a right of first refusal over your next book is a fairly standard contractual provision for publishers of any size, large or small. It means that when you sell them the first book, you agree to let them look at next before any other publisher does.

That can be very valuable to a small publisher, if your first book takes off. They already know that they like your writing (which means that it is not at all presumptuous for you to assume that they might want your next, incidentally), and they would rather not have to compete in order to retain you.

Translation: you might not see an advance for your next book, either. But if getting your work out there is your primary priority, is that really going to annoy you all that much?

The regional publishing house
This is industry-speak for small publishers located outside the publishing capitals of the world — unless you happen to be talking to someone who works at a major NYC agency or publishing house, in which case pretty much any West Coast publisher would fall into the regional category, too. Sometimes, these presses are affiliated with universities, but many are not.

I bring up conversational use of the term advisedly: if you’ve attended any reasonably large writers’ conference within the last two decades, you’ve probably heard at least one agent or editor talking about regional publishing houses as an alternative to the major publishers. Specifically, you may have heard them answer an attendee’s question with something along the lines of, “Well, I wouldn’t be interested in a romantic thriller about wild salmon conservation, but you might try a Pacific Northwest regional press.”

If you’re like most conference attendees, this response probably felt like a brush-off — which, in fairness, it almost certainly was. Most NYC-based agents who deal with major publisher houses prefer to concentrate on books (particularly novels) that have what they call national interest, rather than what they call mere regional appeal.

Basically, national interest means that a book might reasonably be expected to attract readers from all across the country; books with regional appeal, by contrast, might enjoy a fairly substantial market, but it would be concentrated in one part of the country. Or, to put it another way, books of national interest will strike agents and editors in New York City (or, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, and/or Chicago) as universally appealing.

Interestingly, books set in any of the boroughs of New York are almost never deemed of merely regional interest, even though novels set in Brooklyn do not, as a group, enjoy a demonstrably higher demand than those set in, say, Minneapolis. As far as I know, readers in Phoenix have not been storming bookstores, clamoring for greater insight into daily life in Queens, Chelsea, or Ozone Park. Yet it’s undeniable that many a Manhattan-based agent or editor would find such insights more accessible than those of the fine citizenry of eastern Nevada or the wilds of British Columbia.

Why? Well, it’s not all that uncommon for an NYC based agent or editor, as well as their respective Millicents, never to lived anywhere but the upper eastern seaboard of the United States. My agent boasts that he’s never lived more than ten miles from the hospital where he was born (and if you want to keep on his good side, learn from my sad example and don’t instantly exclaim, “Oh, you poor thing. You really need to get out more.” Trust me on this one.)

The moral: regional marketability, like beauty, most definitely resides in the eye of the beholder.

Which is precisely why a writer of a book with strong regional appeal should consider approaching a local small publisher — which, in most cases, means the local publisher, singular — or at any rate one based in your time zone. A book on homelessness in San Francisco may well strike a Bay Area editor as being of broad interest in a way that it simply wouldn’t to an agent in Manhattan; an incisive novel on the domestic trials of a Newfoundland fishing village might well make more sense to a Canadian editor, or at least can at least find Newfoundland on a map on the first try.

Unless, of course, that last book is by an author who has already won the Pulitzer Prize. Then, you have THE SHIPPING NEWS, and its interest is global. Name recognition is a great dissolver of borders.

Just because a regional press’ editors are more likely to understand the market appeal of your book, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that regional press will be able to get such a book national exposure (although it’s been known to happen.) Like other small publishers, regional presses that concentrate on a particular part of the country usually don’t have much money for book promotion.

What they have tends to be concentrated within a small geographical area. For some books, this works beautifully, but it’s unlikely to land an author on the New York Times’ bestseller list. Again: calculated risk.

Fair warning: contrary to the agent’s comment I reproduced at the beginning of this section, few regional presses actually publish fiction these days, at least in novel form. Some presses who specialize in regional nonfiction do publish short story collections; others will publish regional children’s books. But so few have published novels within the last ten years that I am always astonished when a NYC-based agent implies that they do.

Again, you’re going to want to do your homework before you query or submit. At least more homework than the agent who dismissed the Pacific Northwest novelist above.

Speaking of shifts in publishing, there’s something else you might want to know about approaching a small publisher.

Remember how I had said that things change? Well…
As pretty much any writer whose agent has been circulating a book for her recently could tell you (but might not, for fear of jinxing the submission process), selling a book to a major publisher has gotten a heck of a lot harder over the last couple of years. So much so that agents who would have huffily rejected the very notion of taking their clients’ work to an indie publisher just a few years ago have been thinking about it very seriously indeed of late.

More importantly for those of you who might be considering approaching a small publisher on your own behalf, some of them are actually doing it.

What does that mean for the unagented writer? Well, more competition, among other things, and more polished competition. In other words, an unagented writer’s book usually has to be even better than usual to land a spot in the print queue.

Also, as you may recall from earlier in this series, reputable agents only make money when they sell their clients’ books, so it’s very much in their interest to try to haggle up the advances on books sold to small publishers. In a company where there isn’t, as I mentioned above, much money to throw toward authors, guess what that tends to mean for the advances available for unagented books?

Uh-huh. But again, if your primary goal is to see your work in print, is that necessarily a deal-breaker?

Speaking of money, do make sure before you submit to a small publisher that it isn’t a subsidy press, one that requires authors to put up some percentage of the costs of publication. Unfortunately, not all subsidy publishers are up front about this; the latter’s websites can look awfully similar to the former’s. Before you cough up even one red cent — or, ideally, before you approach them at all — check with Preditors and Editors to see whether the publisher charges authors fees.

Which a traditional small publisher should not. But if chipping in to get your book published sounds like a reasonable idea to you, just you wait until next time, when I’ll be talking about self-publishing.

In any case, you’re going to want to proceed with care — and do your homework. Naturally, this swift overview isn’t the last word on small publishers: as I said, an aspiring writer thinking about going that route owes it to herself do extensive research on the subject. So hie yourself to a well-stocked bookstore, start pulling books in your category off the shelves, and see who published them. Then find out whether any of those presses are open to queries from unagented authors.

And then, who knows? Remember, the only manuscript that stands no chance of getting published is the one its writer never sends out.

I just mention. Keep up the good work!

The getting-a-book-published basics, or, how does a book concept make it from a New Year’s resolution to a shelf at Borders?

gutenberg press drawing

Welcome to 2010, long- and short-term members of the Author! Author! community. May this be a year of major steps forward: starting the book of your dreams, finishing the book of your dreams, revising your manuscript until it becomes the book of your dreams, discovering the best agent on earth to represent it, convincing the best agent on earth to represent it, that agent blandishing the ideal editor into reading it, said ideal editor falling in love with it, a lucrative sale and easy publication process, readers eager to bury their noses in it, a second book (or a third, or a fifteenth) that exceeds expectations, a well-deserved Pulitzer prize.

You know, the basics of a writing life well-lived.

An especially hearty howdy-do and handshake for those of you acting on a New Year’s resolution to learn how to get your book into print. Or how to land an agent. Or why a writer might need to land an agent in order to get her book into print. You’ve happened upon this blog at an excellent time, because I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks getting down to those very brass tacks. I’m going to be addressing the two most basic questions of the writerly life:

(1) How does a book go from sitting on an aspiring writer’s desk to being sold in a bookstore?

(2) What, if anything, does an aspiring writer need to know to navigate that trip successfully?

Why go straight to the root of the quest, rather than simply handing those new to the game a couple of one-page sheets of directions? Well, first of all, because there are plenty of advice-givers out there willing to bark unexplained orders at those new to the biz. In my experience, quick-and-dirty isn’t nearly as helpful as carefully-explained. Unless a writer understands why things work the way they do, he’s not only likely to break the rules — he’s not going to be able to improve his game.

Heck, he may not be able to play with the big kids at all. So: let’s talk fundamentals.

That chorus of groans you just heard, newcomers, arose from some of the longer-term readers of this blog who were really, really into my recent series on self-editing. “But Anne,” they whimper, ink-stained fingers gesticulating, didn’t you tell us just the other day that since half the writers in North America suddenly send out queries and submissions” (you’ll be tossing around those terms very soon, newbies, never fear) “as part of their New Year’s resolutions, we should hunker down and wait until mid-February before trying afresh? Wouldn’t that hiatus be a dandy time for, you know, revision?”

Indeed it would be, ink-stained protestors. A review of the basics before leaping back into the fray is never a bad idea. But just to keep it interesting, I’ll make a valiant effort to keep tucking tidbits useful for self-editors into the corners of my next couple of weeks’ posts. I wouldn’t want you to feel that I was ignoring old friends for new.

And let’s face it: a crash course in how the publishing industry works isn’t a bad idea before leaping back into the fray. As I’m sure many of you are already well aware, when a rejection is staring a writer in the face, it’s awfully easy to forget that it isn’t personal; good book concepts and well-written manuscripts is just part of how the system works.

Didn’t expect me to be so up-front about it, did you, newbies? Fair warning: this series is going to be rather disturbing to any writer who believes that the only real test of whether a manuscript is any good is whether it gets published. Or that a good manuscript will always be able to find an agent, and swiftly.

At the risk of repeating myself, that’s just not how it works.

Honest. I’ve been in the game practically since birth, and I’m here to tell you, there is no literature fairy. No winsome sprite will guide an agent to the doorstep of a talented new writer, simply because she is talented; the writer has to take some steps to flag that agent down.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, amn’t I? I haven’t even laid the foundation of gloom-inducing yet, and here I am, waving from a second-floor window.

What I’m about to tell you may well be depressing — heck, it depresses me, and I have an agent — but please, I implore you, stick with this series, even if you are already fairly familiar with, say, how to construct a passable English sentence or to write a query. This is information that everyone even considering trying to bring his book to publication needs to know.

Seriously, it’s to your advantage. Aspiring writers who misunderstand how books do and don’t get published are likely to waste their time and resources on unsolicited submissions that will inevitably get rejected.

In other words, those of you who just murmured, “What’s an unsolicited submission?” are not the people for whom I am writing this. I’m talking to every aspiring writer within the sound of my voice. I want to help you succeed.

So let’s get this baby cranking, as Johann Gutenberg doubtless said to his assistants in 1450 or so.

Because there are several ways a book can end up on a shelf in your local literary emporium, I’m going to break up the question into several parts. First, I’m going to tackle the classic means, publication through a great big publishing house.

But first, a little history — and while we’re at it, let’s debunk a few widely-believed myths.

How books used to get published during the Theodore Roosevelt administration, or, how a surprisingly high percentage of aspiring writers (mistakenly) believe the industry still works
A hundred years ago, the publication process was pretty straightforward: an author wrote a book, contacted an editor at a publishing house, and if the editor liked it, he (it was almost invariably a he) chatted about it with senior staff, persons with whom he may well have shared a dormitory at some elite private college; if he could convince them to take a chance on the manuscript, he would edit it for publication. Printing presses were set in motion, and in due course, the book was available for sale. The publisher sent out advance copies to newspapers, so they could produce reviews.

Of course, that was back when there were few enough books published in these United States that most releases from a good-sized publishing house could garner a review in a major newspaper or magazine. Now, so many books are published in any given year that only a tiny fraction of them enjoy the substantial publicity of a well-placed review.

Which is why, in case you’ve been wondering, you’re far more likely to see a review of the eighteenth novel by an already-established author than the brilliant debut another. Assuming that the newspaper or magazine in question even carries book reviews anymore.

Heck, that’s assuming that you’re even reading newspapers anymore.

Back to days of yore. Amazingly, considering that authors often possessed only one copy of their manuscripts — remember, the photocopier wasn’t invented until 1938, and it wasn’t commonly available until two decades later — it wasn’t uncommon for writers just to pack their books into boxes and send them to publishers without any preliminary correspondence.

This is what’s known in the biz as an unsolicited submission, a manuscript an author sends to an agent or editor without said agent or editor’s having asked to see it. Today, an unsolicited manuscript that appears on an editor’s desk out of a clear blue sky is invariably rejected unread.

Not every aspiring writer believes that, however, because they’ve heard what used to happen to such manuscripts in the days of the Model A: publishers would set these books aside until some luckless employee of the publishing house had time to go through the stack.

This ever-burgeoning source of reading material was known as the slush pile. Although solicited submissions (i.e., those that the editor has actually asked to see) have probably always enjoyed a competitive advantage, slush pile manuscripts did occasionally get discovered and published.

They also, predictably, got lost on a fairly regular basis. Thus the old writerly truism: never send anyone the only copy of your manuscript.

That hasn’t always been easy advice to follow, unless one happened to command a personal army of copyists and/or a steno pool; see my earlier comment about historical access to copy machines.

Because there were fewer manuscripts (and publishing houses were more heavily staffed) before the advent of the personal computer, a writer did not need an agent: it was possible to deal directly with the editor who would handle the book, or at any rate with the luckless assistant whose job it was to go through the slush pile. But back when jolly old TR (Roosevelt hated being called Teddy) was overseeing the nation’s business, it was also still completely permissible to submit a manuscript in longhand, too.

Times change, as they say; no agent or editor in her right mind would read even a sentence of a hand-written submission today. Another way that time changed the publishing industry was that publishing houses began expecting to see fiction and nonfiction presented to them differently.

The fiction/nonfiction split
Both historically and now, novels were (and are) sold to publishers in pretty much the form you would expect: as complete manuscripts, and only as complete manuscripts. At least, editors buy first novels that way; until fairly recently, the major publishing houses quite routinely offered fiction writers who had written promising first novels could snag a multi-book contract.

It took until the 1990s for publishers to notice that a commercially successful first book is not necessarily an absolute predictor of whether the author’s second or third book will sell well. Usually, there was a pretty good reason for that: the author spent five or ten years, or even a lifetime, cranking out that first novel, but after it hit the big time, her editor began clamoring for the next immediately. The author tossed something together in a year, and poof! Everyone was astonished that the second wasn’t nearly as good as the first.

Hmm, who could have predicted that? As late as the 1980s, not the publishing industry.

As a result, while multi-book fiction contracts still exist — particularly in genre fiction, which is conducive to series-production — they have become substantially less common in the mainstream and women’s fiction markets. Which is to say: the vast majority of fiction is sold on a per-book basis. While previously-published authors can occasionally sell subsequent books based upon only a few chapters (known, unsurprisingly, as a partial), novelists should expect to write books– and have them polished into publishable form before they can sell them.

Nonfiction, however, is typically sold not on the entire book, but via a marketing packet known as a book proposal. There are several hefty categories on the archive list at right on how to put one together, but for the purposes of this post, a generalization will suffice: a book proposal is a packet consisting of a description of the proposed book, a sample chapter, descriptions of subsequent chapters, and an array of marketing materials.

Typically, these materials include everything from a detailed analysis of similar books already on the market to an explanation of who the target readership is and why this book will appeal to them to a marketing plan. Traditionally, previously published writers also include clippings of their earlier work in their book proposals — which is why, in case you’d been wondering, so many nonfiction books are authored by journalists. They tend to have stacks and stacks of clippings on hand.

Why are clippings helpful in selling a nonfiction book to a publisher? Because they prove that some other editor has thought enough of the proposer’s writing to publish it before. Basically, a book proposal is a job application: in effect, the writer is asking the publishing house to pay her to write the book she’s proposing.

That does not, however, mean that every nonfiction writer will get paid up front, at least not entirely. Why not, you ask? Because buying something that does not yet exist obviously entails running the risk that the author may not deliver, the advance for a book sold in this manner is typically paid in three installments, one when the publication contract is signed, another after the editor has received and accepted the manuscript, and a third when the book actually comes out.

Call it an insurance policy for authorial good behavior. Apparently, novelists are regarded as shiftier sorts, because to this day, the only acceptable proof that novelists can write a book is to have already written one.

Everyone clear on the fiction/nonfiction distinction? If not, please trot right to the comments and ask a pertinent question.

While we’re waiting, let’s move on to one of the other great cosmic mysteries, shall we?

The lingering demise of the slush pile
Just to clear up any misconceptions floating around out there: if you want to sell a book to a major U.S. publisher, you will need an agent to do it for you. The slush pile is no more; currently, all of the major houses will accept only represented manuscripts.

Like any broad-based policy, however, it comes with a few caveats. We’re only talking about the great big publishers here; there are plenty of smaller, independent publishers that do accept direct submission. Very good houses, some of these. One hears tell of some children’s book divisions at major houses that still accept direct submissions; if an editor meets a writer at a conference and positively falls in love with his work, it’s not unheard-of for the editor to help the writer land an agent (usually one with whom the editor has worked recently) in order to side-step the policy. Stuff like that.

But it’s not wise to assume that you’re going to be the exception. If you’re hoping for a contract with a big publisher, get an agent first.

This was not always a prerequisite, of course. Until fairly recently, one element of that fiction/nonfiction split I was regaling you with above was that while novels had to go through an agent, nonfiction writers could submit proposals directly to publishers. Not so much anymore.

You novelists out there are getting a bit restive, aren’t you? “But Anne,” I hear some of you complaining, and who could blame you? “This is starting to seem a trifle discriminatory against my ilk. Nonfiction writers are presenting substantially less writing than fiction writers; a proposal’s what, 40-60 pages, typically? As a novelist, I’m expected to produce an entire book before I approach an agent, much less a publishing house. I would have thought that if publishing houses were going to distrust anybody enough to want an agent to vouch for ‘em, it would be the author whose book they were buying at the idea stage.”

Don’t upset yourselves, oh novelists; it’s not good for your stomach acids, and besides, since everyone needs an agent now, it’s a moot point. But I suspect that the answer to your question is that that publishers habitually receive far more fiction submissions than nonfiction ones — interesting, given the long-standing industry truism that fiction is easier to sell, both to editors and to readers. (It probably also has something to do with the fact that nonfiction books are often proposed by those with clip-worthy previous publishing credentials, such as magazine articles and newspaper columns, but believe me, the other reason would be more than sufficient.)

Before petty bickering begins to break out between fiction and nonfiction writers over a situation that has more or less vanished anyway, let’s turn our attention to a more absorbing topic: why would the big publishing houses feel so strongly about agents that they would all agree upon a represented-manuscripts-only policy?

The rise of the agent
Although many aspiring writers regard the necessity of procuring an agent as at best a necessary evil, agents perform an exceedingly important role in the current publishing market: not only do they bring brilliant new writers and amazing new books to editors’ attention, but they are now also effectively the first-round submission screeners for the publishing houses.

Okay, so they bring some not-so-hot writers and less-than-amazing books to ‘em, too, but try to see the forest, not the trees here. By passing along only what they consider marketable and of publishable quality, agents thin the volume of submissions the publishers see on a monthly basis to Niagara Falls, rather than the Atlantic Ocean.

Everybody understand that? Agents reject 95% of the queries they receive, and an even higher percentage of submitted manuscripts, so the publishers don’t have to do so.

It’s easy to resent agents for this, to think of them as the self-appointed gatekeepers of American literature, but that’s not really fair. Much of what they assure that the editors never see honestly isn’t publishable, after all; I hate to disillusion anyone (and yet here I am doing it), but as Millicent the agency screener would be the first to tell you, a hefty majority of the writing currently being queried, proposed, and submitted is simply not very well written. Even very promisingly-written submissions are often misformatted, or would require major editing, or just plain are not quite up to professional standards.

Or so runs the prevailing wisdom; we could debate for weeks over the extent to which that’s really true, or how difficult it often is for genuinely innovative writing to land an agent. Suffice it to say that if the major publishers believed that agents were rejecting manuscripts that their editors should be seeing, they presumably would change their policies about accepting only agented manuscripts, right?

“Okay, Anne,” I hear some of you reluctantly conceding, “I get that if I hope to sell my book to a major U.S. publisher, I’m going to need to find myself an agent. But if you don’t mind my asking, what do I get out of the exchange, other than a possible entrée to an editorial desk?”

A good agent can do quite a bit for a writer. First, as you reluctant conceders already pointed out, an agent can make sure your manuscript or book proposal lands on the right desks: not just any old editor’s, but an editor with a successful track record in acquiring books like yours and shepherding them through the sometimes difficult publication process. (Don’t worry; I’ll be clarifying that part later in this series.) Pulling that off requires both an intimate knowledge of who is looking to buy what right now — not always an easy task, considering how quickly publishing fads change and editorial staffs turn over — but also the connections to enable a successful pitch to the right audience.

In other words, for an agent to be good at his job, he can’t just send out submissions willy-nilly; he must have the experience to target the editors who are most likely to be interested in any given book.

Agents also negotiate book contracts for their clients, act as a liaison between the author and the publishing house, and help mediate any disputes that might arise. Like, for instance, if the publishing house is being a mite slow in coughing up the contracted advance.

Yes, it happens, I’m sorry to report. And if it happens to you, you’re going to want an experienced agent on your side, fighting for your dosh.

Admittedly, it will be very much in your agent’s self-interest to make sure that you’re paid: in the U.S., reputable agents earn their livings solely from commissions (usually 15%) on their clients’ work. That means, of course, that if they don’t sell books, the agency doesn’t make any money.

Allow me to repeat that, because: agencies are seldom non-profit enterprises. Contrary to common belief amongst aspiring writers, their employees are not primarily concerned with the task of discovering great new talent, but rather with finding books they believe the agency can sell within the current literary market.

In other words, they reject books they know to be written well. Routinely. Because if they can’t sell the book, the agency does not make money.

It’s honestly as simple as that. See why knowing how agencies work might help you take a rejection less personally?

Typically, the agent will handle all of the money an author makes on her book: the publisher pays advances and royalties to the agency, not directly to the author; the agency will then deduct the agent’s percentage, cut a check for the rest, and send it to the author. In the U.S., agencies are also responsible for providing their clients and the IRS with tax information and documentation.

Since self-employed people like writers have been known to get audited from time to time, you’re going to appreciate this level of verifiability once you become successful. Trust me on this one.

To recap how things have changed since Theodore Roosevelt roamed the earth:
Way back when: aspiring writers used to be able to approach editors at major publishing houses directly to market their books.
The reality now: with few exceptions, a writer will require an agent to approach a publisher for her.

Way back when: fiction and nonfiction books were marketed in the same manner, as already-completed manuscripts.
The reality now: fiction is sold on the entire manuscript; with certain exceptions, nonfiction is sold as via a book proposal.

Way back when: nonfiction writers could approach major publishing houses directly with their book proposals.
The reality now: agents submit both fiction and nonfiction books on behalf of their authors.

Way back when: agents played a substantially smaller role in the overall dynamic of U.S. publishing.
The reality now: agents largely determine which manuscripts editors will and will not see.

Way back when: an author often formed a personal relationship with his editor and other publishing house staff, sometimes lasting decades.
The reality now: the editor who acquires a book may not still be the editor handling it by the time it goes to press; a good agent can do a lot to help smooth over any resulting difficulties.

Whew — that’s quite a lot of information to absorb in a single post, isn’t it? I’m going to stop for the day, to give all of this time to sink in. Next time, on to what happens to a book after an agent submits it to an editor at a publishing house!

Yes, yes, I know: this isn’t precisely fun material to cover, but you will be happier in the long run if you’re familiar with it.

But wait — I haven’t given you a self-editing tip yet today, have I? Here’s one that will keep many of you busy for a good, long while: in most adult fiction, professional readers like Millicent prefer to see tag lines — all of those he said, she exclaimed, they cried statements that litter the average dialogue scene — minimized, or even omitted entirely. Unless there is serious doubt about which character is speaking when, they usually aren’t necessary.

Quotation marks, after all, indicate that what falls within them is being spoken aloud. So dialogue that runs like this:

Johnny smoothed back his pompadour, copied from a torn photo of his grandfather. “Yeah?” he said. “Who’s gonna make me?”

Tina quailed in fear, but she stood her ground. “I am,” she said stoutly.

“Ooh,” Johnny said, “this is going to be fun. I haven’t created a scar in weeks.”

may often be trimmed to the following, with no real loss of meaning:

Johnny smoothed back his pompadour, copied from a torn photo of his grandfather. “Yeah? Who’s gonna make me?”

Tina quailed, but she stood her ground stoutly. “I am.”

“Ooh, this is going to be fun. I haven’t created a scar in weeks.”

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the most graceful way to work today’s editing tip into the text. Hey, I’m just warming up here. Keep up the good work!

How to write a really good query letter, part VI: toiling productively in the vineyards of literature, or, would Pavlov’s doggie like a biscuit?

Those of you who have been hanging around Author! Author! for a while may well recognize this gorgeous image from the Book of Hours. I like to yank it out of the mothballs every now and again, because it is such an accurate depiction of how so many aspiring writers view the work of querying these days: a long, toilsome effort aimed toward impressing the powerful folks in the white castle on the hill — who may or may not be paying attention — under a sky that (we hope) conceals at least a few minor deities rooting for the underdog’s eventual success.

What’s that you say, campers? That’s what it felt like back I was trying to find the right agent back in the dimly-remembered mists of the Paleolithic era, but everyone concerns feels perfectly marvelous about the process today? Whew, that’s a relief — thanks for clearing up that little misconception.

On the off chance that I wasn’t the only writer who ever shivered in the face of seemingly unalterable industry coldness, I feel an obligation to point out from the other side of the Rubicon that even those newest to querying are not as entirely helpless in the face of it as we writers tend to tell ourselves we are. Although much of a writer’s progress along the road to publication is dependent upon factors outside her control — fads in style, fashions in content, and what kind of memoir has garnered the most scandals recently, to name but three — how an aspiring writer presents her work to the industry is in fact entirely under her own control.

Which is a really, really nice way of saying that from a professional reader’s point of view, scads of query letters traject themselves like lemmings straight from the envelope into the rejection pile with scarcely a pause in between.

Sadly, the vast majority are rejected for reasons that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the potential personality fit between the author and agent, the agent’s ability to sell the book in question, or even the quality of the writing. Because agents and their screeners read hundreds of the darned things per week, even if only 20 of them share the same basic mistake — and trust me, more of them will — the 21rst query that carries even a shade of similarity is likely to trigger a knee-jerk reaction so strong that even Dr. Pavlov would shake his head and say, “No kidding? Just because the letter was addressed to Dear Agent, rather than to an individual?”

Oh, yes, Dr. Pavlov, there are few epistolary errors that engender a stronger — or quicker — negative response than a Dear Agent letter. But that’s merely the best-known of the notorious query-readers’ pet peeves.

I heard that giant collective huff of indignation out there: you’re thinking that Millicent the agency screener is hyper-sensitive, far more eager to reject a query than to accept it, and perhaps even downright mean. Heck, judging by the expressions on your faces, you probably wouldn’t be remotely surprised to learn that she regularly eats live kittens for breakfast, snarls at babies, and honks her horn when Boy Scouts assist people with canes across the street.

Don’t be ridiculous. Millicent lives in New York City; she doesn’t drive a car.

Perhaps she does reject writers for a living, but that doesn’t mean that rejections are necessarily her fault: as I mentioned earlier in this series, many, many, MANY query letters just scream from their very first paragraph, “Reject me! I have no idea what I’m doing on your desk, much less what book category the manuscript my rambling prose professes to promote might best fit into, so why not put me out of my misery right away?”

The ubiquity of such self-rejecting letters means that the all-too-common writerly practice of blaming the rejector is not the best strategy for landing an agent. Call me zany, but if a query elicits a rejection for any reason other than that the storyline or argument in the proposed book didn’t grab Millicent or her boss, my first question is not, “Oh, how could the screener have made such a mistake?” but “May I have a look at that letter, so see how the writer may improve it?”

Why do I tend to leap straight to that conclusion, you ask? Experience, mostly. If there is a single rule of thumb that may be applied at every stage of any successful author’s career, it’s that it ALWAYS behooves us to look critically at our own writing before assuming that the only possible explanation for frowned-upon writing lies in the eye of the predisposition of the reader to frown.

My, that was a convoluted sentence, wasn’t it? Let me put it more simply: offense does not always lie in the propensity of the affronted to take umbrage. Millicent may indeed be a bit rejection-happy at times, but any writer can learn how to avoid provoking her.

As with a manuscript, the writer of a query will virtually always be better off taking steps to improve what she can control than blaming the rejection upon other factors. It is possible to learn from one’s own mistakes, even in the current insanely competitive agent-seeking environment, where the vast majority of queriers are never told precisely what made Millicent slide their letters directly into their SASEs with a copy of the agency’s prefab one-size-fits-all rejection note.

Or, in the case of e-queries, to hit the REPLY key, sending the prefab rejection reply. (You didn’t honestly believe that Millicent or her boss actually re-typed those platitudes every time, did you?)

In the spirit of trying to avoid being the object of either dismal fate, I began running through a checklist of some of the most common query letter mistakes yesterday. Let’s recap, shall we?

(1) Is my query letter longer than a single page in standard correspondence format?

(2) If my query letter just refuses to be shorter, am I trying to do too much here?

(3) If my query letter is too long, am I spending too many lines of text describing the plot?

(4) Is my query letter polite?

(5) Is it clear from the first paragraph on what precisely I am asking the agent to represent?

(6) Does my letter sound as though I am excited about this book, or as if I have little confidence in the work? Or does it read as though I’m apologizing for querying at all?

(7) Does my book come across as genuinely marketable, or does the letter read as though I’m boasting?

Please do take the time to re-read your query before you answer these questions or the ones to come. Yes, even if some of these points sound a trifle redundant to those of you who have been reading my blog for a while: you would be well within your rights to think, honestly, don’t all of us know by now to avoid sounding bitter in a query letter? Or to be polite while doing it?

Well, probably so, but humor me here, because it’s quite easy to fall into the habit of pumping out those queries without really pondering their content — or whether this particular letter is the best means of marketing to that particular agent.

In fact, serial queriers often do not change anything but the first paragraph, address, and salutation between each time they sent out their mailed letters, more or less insuring that a mistake made once will be replicated a dozen times. Copying and pasting the text of one e-mailed query into the next guarantees it.

And those of you who habitually did this were surprised to receive form-letter rejections? The electronic age has made it much, much easier to be dismissive.

In short, it’s worth reviewing what’s going out every once in a while, to ascertain that the query matches the recipient well. Which, coincidentally, brings me to the next question on the checklist:

(8) Have I addressed this letter to a specific person, rather than an entire agency or any agent currently walking the face of the earth? Does it read like a form letter?

Many aspiring writers approach quite a few agents simultaneously — and with good reason. At this point in publishing history, when many agencies don’t even respond to e-mailed queries if the answer is no, waiting to hear back from one agent before approaching the next is poor strategy. One-by-one queries can add years to the agent-finding process.

Do I hear some restless murmuring out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you conference veterans protest, “I heard that some agents will become furious if they find out that a writer is sending out many queries simultaneously. I don’t want to scare them away from my book by breaking their rules right off the bat!”

I agree with the general principle imbedded in this cri de coeur — it’s only prudent to check an agency’s website and/or its listing in one of the standard agency guides to ascertain that you know what precisely the agent you are addressing wants to see in a query packet. If you haven’t been agent-shopping lately, the differentials can be astonishing: some want queries only, others want synopses, many ask for pages to be placed in the body of an e-mail, a few ask queriers just to go ahead and send the first 50 pages unsolicited.

The moral: there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all query packet. In order not to run afoul of these wildly disparate expectations, a querier must be willing to do a bit of homework and follow individualized directions.

Admittedly, sometimes an agency’s listing in one of the standard guides, its website, and what one of its member agents will say at a conference are at odds. In the event of a serious discrepancy, don’t call or e-mail the agency to find out which they prefer. Go with the information that appears to be most recent — in my experience, that’s usually what’s posted either on the website or on Publisher’s Marketplace.

What no agency will EVER leave off any of its expressions of preference, however, is mention of a policy forbidding simultaneous querying, the practice of sending out queries to more than one agent at a time. Some do have policies against simultaneous submissions, where more than one agent is reading requested materials at the same time, but believe me, the agencies that want an exclusive peek tend to be VERY up front about it.

So If you have checked to ascertain that the agent of your dreams — or at least the next on your list — does not have an exclusivity policy, you should assume that s/he doesn’t. End of story. Trust me, if an agent who does prefer an exclusive peek doesn’t want other agents seeing it, s/he will let you know.

Until then, it’s a waste of your valuable time to grant a de facto exclusive to someone who hasn’t asked for it. (For some tips on dealing with an actual request for an exclusive, if and when it comes up, please see the EXCLUSIVES TO AGENTS category on the list at right.)

So why does the rumor that that most agents secretly crave exclusives (and thus penalize queriers who don’t read their minds and act accordingly) remain so pervasive? Beats me. If I had to guess, I would say that it is an unintended side effect of agents’ standing up at writers’ conferences and saying, “For heaven’s sake, don’t send out mass queries — if I see a query that’s clearly been sent to every agent in the book, I send straight it into the rejection pile.”

Since everyone in the room will nod sagely in response, the agent will not unnaturally assume that the entire audience knows that s/he is referring not to the practice of querying several agents simultaneously, but to the astonishing common feat of sending (often via e-mail) an IDENTICAL query letter to, say, a hundred agents all at once. (And if you don’t know why that’s a bad idea, you might want to check out this archived post before you launch a flotilla of your own.)

As we have discussed, a query letter designed to please all is unlikely to be geared to the specific quirks and literary tastes of any particular agent — one of the many reasons that this shotgun approach seldom works. The other, believe it or not, is that mass submitters often render the fact that they don’t know one agent on their lists from another by sending out what is known in the biz as a Dear Agent letter. As in one that begins:

Dear Agent,

I haven’t the vaguest idea who you are or what you represent, but since the big publishing houses don’t accept submissions from unagented authors, I come to you, hat in hand, to beg you to represent my fiction novel…

Why, when there is so much to resent in this (probably quite honest) little missive, would the salutation alone be enough to get this query rejected without reading farther? Well, to folks who work in agencies, such an opening means only one thing: the writer who sent it is sending an identical letter to every agent listed on the Internet or in one of the standard agency guides.

Willy-nilly, with no regard to who represents what and consequently who is likely to be interested in the book at hand.

Which means, they reason, that it is unlikely to the point of mockery that the book being proposed is going to fit the specific requirements and tastes of any of the agents currently domiciled at the agency. And, most will additionally conclude, the writer hasn’t bothered to learn much about how the publishing industry works.

Yes, yes, I know: I’ve talked about this phenomenon before in this series, but I live in terror that even one of my readers will make this fundamental mistake in the interest of saving time. Since virtually any Millicent will simply pitch a Dear Agent letter into the reject pile, if not actually the trash (Dear Agent letter-writers seldom know to include SASEs), it’s in your best interest to make it quite, quite obvious to whom you are addressing your missive. In fact, the query most likely to succeed is one that is specialized not only in the salutation, but in the first paragraph as well.

How, you ask? Good question.

(9) Do I make it clear in the first paragraph of the letter SPECIFICALLY why I am writing to THIS particular agent — or does it read as though I could be addressing any agent in North America?

This is a corollary of the last, of course — to put it another way, writers aren’t the only ones screaming at the heavens, “Why me? Why me?” Agents scream it, too, albeit with a slightly different meaning.

No, but seriously, agents (and their screeners) wonder about this. Given half a chance and a martini or two, many agents will complain vociferously about queries that read as though the writer simply used a mail merge to address letters to every agent listed on a particular website or in a given guide.

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while may find this question SLIGHTLY familiar, and for good reason: this is a NOTORIOUS agents’ pet peeve.

So it’s worth taking a look at your query letter and asking yourself if it answers the question: there are hundreds and hundreds of literary agents in the United States alone — why did you choose this one, out of all others, to query? What specifically about this agent’s track record, literary tastes, and/or bio led you to say, By gum, I would like this person to represent my work?

And no, in this context, because she is an agent and I desperately want to sell my book, is not a reason likely to impress Millicent. She hears it too often.

Remember, agents — like most other people — tend to be proud of their best work: if you want to get on their good side, showing a little appreciation for what they have done in the past is just good strategy. Especially if you can honestly compliment them on a project they really loved, or one that was unusually difficult to sell.

See why I kept urging you earlier this summer to ask those panels of agents at conferences some pointed questions about their favorite projects? I was just looking to help you glean some useful information.

I picked this little trick up not at writers’ conferences, but in academia. When a professor is applying for a job, she is subjected to a form of medieval torture known as a job talk. Not only is she expected to give a lecture in front of the entire faculty that is thinking of hiring here, all of whom are instructed in advance to jump on everything she says with abandon, but she is also expected to have brief private meetings with everyone on the faculty first.

It’s every bit as horrible as it sounds, like going through a series of 20 or 30 interviews with authors who think simply everyone in the universe has read their work. (Everyone smart, anyway.) If you’re the job candidate, you’d better have at least one pithy comment prepared about each and every faculty member’s most recent article, or you’re toast.

Gee, I can’t imagine why I didn’t want to remain in academia. But it did teach me something very valuable indeed: pretty much every human being affiliated with every book ever published likes to be recognized for the fact.

Fortunately, it’s very easy to work a compliment into a query letter without sounding cheesy or obsequious. If the agent you are querying has represented something similar to your work in the past, you have a natural beginning:

Since you so ably represented X’s excellent book, {TITLE}, I believe you may be interested in my novel…”

I had lunch a while back with a writer who used this method in a pitch with triumphant success. The agent was blown away that the writer had taken the time to find out whom she represented and do a little advance reading.

There are many ways to find out what an agent has represented. Check the acknowledgments of books you like (authors often thank their agents), or check the agency’s website to see whom the agent represents. If all else fails, call the book’s publisher, ask for the publicity department, and ask who the agent of record was; legally, it’s a matter of public record, so they have to tell you.

Actually, with small publishers, this isn’t a bad method for finding out what they are looking to publish. I once had a charming conversation with an editor at a small Midwestern press, who confided to me that when she had acquired the book about which I was inquiring, the author did not yet have an agent. Sensing an opportunity, I promptly pitched my book to her — and she asked me to send her the first fifty pages right away.

Moral: sometimes opportunities are hiding in some unexpected places. For instance…

(10) If I met this agent or editor at a conference, or am querying because I heard him/her speak at one, or picked him/her because s/he represents a particular author, do I make that obvious immediately?

I am surprised at how often writers seem reluctant to mention this, but since such a low percentage of the aspiring writers out there attend conferences (under 4%, according to the last estimate I saw), attending a good one that the agent you’re querying also attended is in fact a minor selling point for your book: the prevailing wisdom goes that writers who make the investment in learning how to market their work professionally tend to have more professional work to present.

A kind of old-fashioned notion, true, but if you’re a conference-goer, it’s one you should be riding for all it is worth.

If you have heard the agent speak at a conference, read an article she has written in a writer’s magazine or online, or even just noticed that your favorite author thanked her in the acknowledgments of a book you liked, mention that in the first line of your query letter. If you have no such personal reason, be polite enough to invent a general one:

Since you represent literary fiction, I hope you will be interested in my novel…

I would suggest being even more upfront than this, if the conference in question was a reputable one and you did in fact attend it. Why not write the name of the conference on the outside of the envelope, in approximately the same place where you would have written REQUESTED MATERIALS had you pitched to the agent successfully there?

And if you are an e-querying type, why not mention it in the subject line of the e-mail? (Also a good idea to include: the word QUERY.)

Oh, and lest I forget to mention it later in this series:

(11) Am I sending this query in the form that the recipient prefers to receive it? If I intend to send it via e-mail, have I quadruple-checked that the agency accepts e-mailed queries?

Stop laughing, hard-core web fiends. The publishing world runs on paper — even as I write this, it’s still far from unusual for a prestigious agency not to accept e-submissions at all. Even agencies with websites (which not all of them maintain, even today) that accept submissions directly through the website often employ agents who prefer paper queries, even from writers residing in foreign countries for whom getting the right stamps for the SASE is problematic. (Don’t worry, those of you reading this abroad: I’m going to be talking soon about how to deal with the stamp problem.)

Double-check the agency’s policy before you e-query. This information will be in any of the standard agency guides, and usually on the website as well.

If you’re in any doubt, query via regular mail — strategically, it’s a better idea, anyway.

Yes, you read that correctly. Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of querying via e-mail, for the exceedingly simple reason that it’s far, far less work to reject someone by the press of a single button than by stuffing a response into a SASE. A truly swift-fingered Millicent can reject 50 writers online in the time that it would take her to reject 10 on paper.

Not to mention the fact that the average reader scans words on a screen 70% faster than the same words on paper. (Or at least she did the last time I checked the statistics.) I can’t conceive of any writer who has thought about it actively longing to have Millicent spend less time reading his letter than she already does, can you?

The relative speed of scanning e-queries is why, in case you’re wondering, quite a few of the agencies that actively solicit online queries tend to respond more quickly than those that don’t. Or not at all — which means that it’s also worth your while to check an agency’s policy on responding to e-queries before you approach them; many have policies that preclude responding to a querier if the answer is no.

I sense an unspoken question hanging in the air right now. Go ahead; ask.

“But Anne,” I hear many of you shout, “what happens if I accidentally send an e-query to an agent who doesn’t like them, or a paper query to one who prefers to be approached electronically? That won’t result in an automatic rejection, will it?”

Not necessarily. But let me ask you this: who would you prefer to read your letter, an agent calmly going through a stack (or list) of queries, or an agent whose first thought upon seeing your epistle is, “Oh, God, not another one! Can’t any of these writers READ? I’ve said in the last ten years’ worth of Herman’s Guides that I don’t want to be queried via e-mail!”

I don’t know about you, but given my druthers, I would select the former.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that just as it’s polite to address a person the way he prefers to be addressed, rather than by a hated nickname, a courteous writer should approach an agent in the manner she prefers to be approached. Those with strong preferences either way seldom make a secret of it; verify before you send.

And before anyone out there asks: yes, most agents will assume that a writer worth having as a client will have gone to the trouble of learning something about their personal preferences. If they have expressed a pet peeve in one of the standard agency guides, they will assume that you are aware of it.

While we’re on the subject of double-checking, allow me to sneak in one more quick question before I sign off for the evening:

(12) Am I absolutely positive that I have spelled the agent’s name correctly, as well as the agency’s? Am I positive that the letter I have addressed to Dear Mr. Smith shouldn’t actually read Dear Ms. Smith? Heck, am I even sure that I’m placing the right letter in the right envelope?

I hear some titters out there, but you wouldn’t BELIEVE how common each of these gaffes is. The last is usually just the result of a writer’s being in a hurry to get the next set of queries in the mail, and tend to be treated accordingly, but the first two constitute major breaches of etiquette.

And yes, an agent with a first name that leaves gender a tad ambiguous is every bit as likely to resent an incorrect salutation as a Rebecca or Stephen would. Often more, because a Cricket, Chris, or Leslie would constantly be receiving queries apparently addressed to someone of the opposite sex.

If you’re in serious doubt, call the agency and ask point-blank whether the agent is a Mr. or Ms. (Quick note for those querying US agents from other parts of the world: currently, Mr. or Ms. are the only two options, unless the person in question happens to be a doctor or a professor; unless a woman makes a point of identifying herself as a Miss or Mrs., Ms. is the proper salutation.)

I know, I know: you’ve heard 4500 times that a writer should NEVER call an agency until after he has a signed representation contract in hand or the agent has left a message asking him to call back, whichever comes first. While it is quite true that allowing the agent to set the level of familiarity in the early stages of exchange is good strategy, most offices are set up to allow a caller to ask a quick, anonymous question, if he’s polite about it.

As long as you don’t ask to speak to the agent personally and/or use the occasion to pitch your book, you should be fine.

Have you noticed how many of these tips boil down to some flavor of be clear, do your homework, and be courteous? That’s not entirely accidental: as odd as it may seem in an industry that rejects so many so brusquely, manners honestly do count in this business.

As my grandmother was fond of saying, manners cost nothing. But as I am prone to tell my clients and students, not exhibiting courtesy can cost an aspiring writer quite a lot.

So sit up straight, brush your teeth, and help little old ladies across the street; it will be great practice for working with an agent or editor.

More of the checklist follows next time, of course. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Calling Out the Tyrant: The Voice You Save May be Your Own, by guest blogger Paula Neves

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Welcome back to our ongoing series of guest posts by interesting authors on the subject of censorship, subtle and otherwise. Not entirely coincidentally, as I hope all of you have noticed, this is also the topic for the First Periodic Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence, for which the deadline is a week hence. Join in the conversation, and make me proud with your entries, people!

After Tuesday’s rather downbeat post about the writing path of a gifted poet, I am delighted to be able to bring you a much happier tale today. I think today’s installment in our ongoing series on censorship, subtle and otherwise, is going to speak very directly not just to poets (although many little birds have told me over the years that quite a few long-time Author! Author! readers do indeed write poetry), but to all of you writers who have either been submitting your work — and thus exposing it to the risk of rejection — or scared off from doing so by the sense that it might not be good enough.

Hmm…where have I heard that sentiment before?

Poet, writing coach, and blogger Paula Neves has some words of wisdom on the subject, ones that I hope you will take very, very seriously. Because contrary to what naysayers on the writers’ grapevine so constantly tell aspiring writers, literally the only writing that has NO possibility of getting published is the manuscript that’s never submitted.

Think about that, please, the next time you hesitate about entering your work in a literary contest or querying yet another agent. As we discussed yesterday, no force on earth so effectively prevents a piece of writing from reaching readers as its author’s not allowing it to see the light of day.

Which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with choosing not to try to get one’s work published — I have enormous respect for the Emily Dickinsons of this world who elect to keep their brilliance to themselves, or limiting it to a select few readers, provided that it’s an active choice. There’s a certain nobility to deciding that the world at large is not one’s audience. As Aunt Emily herself wrote:

THE SOUL selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.

I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

Hard to argue with that, eh? But I’m jumping the gun here.

Please join me in welcoming a good poet who has been through the publication mill, has lived to tell the tale — and has been kind enough to share her experiences with all of us here at Author! Author! Many thanks, Paula, and take it away!
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When Anne first approached me to guest blog on Author! Author! about my unique take on censorship in poetry, my immediate reaction (after being flattered) was, no problem—I’ve got plenty of “take” on that. But not in the way you’d expect.

The fact is I haven’t experienced much in the way of censorship in my poetry—if for no other reason than I actually haven’t published much of it yet. How’s that for an admission from someone whose been writing the stuff since falling in love with Emily Dickinson and the glamour of her reclusiveness as an impressionable teen almost three decades (eegads!) ago? Ok, so maybe it is typical for someone who would fall in love with the Belle of Amherst’s hermit tendencies as much as her funky slant rhymes.

Regardless, I haven’t yet experienced the tyranny of editors/agents the way many of you have experienced with your work. But it’s not for lack of want. In short, censorship is something for which I secretly long if only because it means people are actually reading my work (or at least saying they are)!

Certainly, throughout my life, I have experienced censorship in ways related to other kinds of writing/thinking. In college, there was that politically correct academic type, the subtle or not-so-subtle expectation of classroom opinions and written critiques following in the tradition of the paradigm du jour. I recall a particular moment in my undergrad days when I took a course called Homosexuality and Society (taught by a fairly well-known lesbian feminist poet du jour with whom my then girlfriend had previously had a torrid affair, and who had a hand in getting said girlfriend’s thinly veiled verses published –echoes of Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons here—but that’s another story).

This was a course where all were expected to participate and actively relate their own experience to the material. For me as a young gay woman, this meant I was expected to “represent” and be a vocal lesbian feminist spitfire. I was 19, and, although American-born, a good sheltered girl from an insular Portuguese immigrant community far from home (i.e., 30 miles away) for the first time in my life and just coming out/Uhauling: what did I know about spitting fire? Both naturally shy and innately suspicious of “expectations,” I kept my mouth shut and passed the course with a C by the grace of the goddess.

Was it jealousy of the professor’s previous entanglement with my girlfriend that made me stubbornly refuse to “participate”? Was it that I didn’t actually believe in the homophobic origins of women’s oppression? Heck, no. Like I said, I was a young gay and sheltered Portuguese woman, the first in my immediate family to even go to college, never mind take a course like Homosexuality and Society. That alone was enough to keep me quiet and reflective.

Not long after this experience, two of my poems were published in fairly rapid succession. I had been writing poetry for nearly a decade at that point, but these pieces were the first I had sent out to legitimate (i.e., non-vanity) venues (with the exception of the time I was 17 and, after getting encouraging feedback from the editor at the Plains Poetry Journal, made the classic amateur’s mistake of overwhelming the poor soul for months with other examples of my “promise”). One of the poems was about sex and appeared in a Tee Corinne-edited anthology called (what a surprise) The Poetry of Sex, which became a Lambda Literary Award finalist; the other was about being the child of immigrants and ran in the (now defunct) The Portuguese Heritage Journal.

Although the yawping silence between these two major life themes was disconcerting, the response from the editors of these publications was surprisingly positive. The folks at The Portuguese Heritage Journal encouraged me to send more work and ended up publishing a couple of my articles, all I ever sent them before they folded the venture a few years later. Tee Corinne solicited work, a short fiction piece this time, which she ended up accepting and placing as the opening story, for her next anthology, The Body of Love. She also graciously accepted my request to interview her for one of the profiles I was writing for Uncommon Heroes, an anthology of queer role models. And she said to keep in touch. I never did.

Sure, I could chalk up some of this lack of follow-through to being young and dumb.

After college, out in the “real world,” I found work on the other side of the writing spectrum as a technical writer/editor and experienced the endemic censorship of office politics. You know, the kind where, no matter how much you write, rewrite and tighten sentences in a report, article or two-line ad copy, the boss always changes a semi-colon to a comma, active voice to passive, or adds a few more adjectives or prepositional phrases because

1. He’s older and went to a better school than you;

2. He’s a member of Mensa and of course knows grammar better anyone in the office; or

3. Because he’s the boss and can.

He then passes the masterpiece on to his boss and the process begins anew. You get the idea.

Despite these workplace entertainments, my personal writing and poetry remained fairly unaffected. Again, not for lack of being written (and rewritten) in hundreds of computer files, notebook pages, grocery receipts, envelopes, napkins (no scrap of tree pulp was safe), but for lack of being shown. During my nine years in the traditional 9-to-5 hitch, I sent poems to perhaps two-dozen outlets of various kinds. The results:

* two pieces appeared successively in a Princeton-based newspaper’s annual fiction and poetry issue, which paid an honorarium (miniscule, but still);

* I was accepted to do readings at three state-funded poetry/performance events—also paid;

* I did one-on-one critiques of high school student poems for a teen arts festival—also paid;

* various poems appeared in several issues of the literary magazine of the English department in the community college at which I worked;

* numerous poems have appeared in The Newark Metro, an online journal affiliated with my grad school; apart from the publication itself, this has resulted in my developing a good working relationship with the well-respected editor, a big fan of my work.

(On these latter two points, never underestimate the value of “small” or school-related publications: exposure is exposure and there are some incisive and often well-connected literary people behind these journals.)

Of course, I don’t mean this to sound like an ad for “You too can be published simply by submitting your work.” I’ve had plenty of rejections from publications, across genres. However, considering that I think of myself as a poet first and how relatively few poems I’ve actually sent out, my stats are in that area are pretty good. I’m also not saying this because I think I’m to Emily what Hart Crane wanted to be to Walt Whitman.

I’m saying it because my own worst editor/agent/critic has been…me.

Some of you may recognize this siren song of self-censorship. It sounds something like, “It’s not good enough”; “Maybe this isn’t really my genre”; “It’s going to get rejected anyway; it was already rejected several times”; “There would only be a limited audience for this anyway/This can get in local publications but not the really big ones” (one of my favorites); or variations thereof. Even for experienced writers these doubts can creep in and result in dejection, procrastination and missed opportunities.

Sure, maybe my early follow-through had to do with being young and inexperienced, but what was my excuse in my mid-thirties when, with reams of poems written, plenty of workshops, classes, and even encouragement under my belt, I brought nothing with me to a writer’s conference, and had nothing to show a small press publisher who was actively seeking new work and specifically asked to see some of my poems?

In my case, my failure to “show” had a lot to do with insecurity and trouble reconciling two integral parts of my identity. Since my poetry is, for the most part, confessional, my reticence to expose it was telling. Literally.

Eventually, I got that it was telling me to take the gamble, put the work out there. Not everyone will “get” it or like it, or understand what the big deal is/was about holding back. Maybe some of it still shows developmental tics.

Who cares? Take the risk.

Or risk missing other opportunities. At some point “it’s not good enough” has to be examined for whether it means the work or you.

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paulaheadshotPaula Neves has been writing across genres since she was a teen, but has always loved poetry, to which she keeps returning. Her poetry has appeared in The Newark Metro, The Princeton Packet’s US1 Summer Fiction and Poetry series, a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Poetry-Sex-Lesbians-Write-Erotic/dp/0934411506″>The Poetry of Sex, and The Portuguese Heritage Journal. She has read all over the New York metropolitan area, most recently as the “sunrise poet” (a one-hour daybreak reading) at the Newark Museum’s Centennial Celebration. She has studied poetry and fiction under writers such as J. D. McClatchy, Rachel Hadas, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Alice Dark and was recently accepted into the MFA in Poetry program at Rutgers-Newark.

Paula is the founder of Technical Writing Service and blogs at Itinerant Muse.

So how does a book go from manuscript to published volume, anyway? Part XI: routes to publication other than through a major house

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For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been going over what I consider the absolutely most important information for any aspiring writer to know prior to beginning to market her work. As so often happens when I really get my teeth into a topic, I began by thinking, “Oh, I can polish this off in a couple of days. And now, ten awfully long (even by my rather prolix standards) posts later, I keep coming up with more to say.

Several lessons to be learned from this, I suspect. First, the simplest questions –in this case, How do books get published? often have really, really complicated answers, and having the space and audience to give them their due is an invitation not to minimize their complexity. Hey, boiling down multifaceted reality into bite-sized aphorisms is hard. Glancing back through what I’ve written so far, I was reminded of the old joke about the reporter interviewing the famous college professor about how long it typically takes him to write a half-hour lecture.

“Oh, all day,” the professor says, “if it’s a topic I’ve never lectured on before. Sometimes several days.”

The reporter is awfully impressed at that level of dedication. “Wow, that’s a lot of work. How long to write an hour-long lecture on the same topic?”

The professor shrugs. “About three hours.”

The reporter wonders if he has misheard the response. To be safe, he asks, “Well, how long would it take you to prepare a three-hour lecture, then?”

The professor smiles. “Would you like me to start right now?”

I suspect that I was reminded of this joke because I couldn’t help noticing that each post in this series was approximately the length of my usual notes for an hour-long lecture, factoring in time for digression and questions — you can take the professor away from the rostrum, but not the rostrum out of the professor’s mind, apparently — but I also believe that there’s a vital lesson here for those who are used to receiving their information about getting published in the kind of sound bites one hears the pros spouting at conferences.

It’s this: while brief, snappy advice may seem simpler, it’s actually significantly harder to produce, at least if it’s done thoughtfully. Unless, of course, the advice-giver is merely parroting the conventional wisdom on the subject, which tends to be expressed in dismissive one- or two- sentence bursts.

See my earlier post on translating these truisms.

The problem is, trying to follow sound-bite advice is rather like gnawing on cubes of bouillon instead of drinking broth: the two substances may well contain the same ingredients, but it’s certainly easier to digest in the watered-down form. Particularly when, as in this case, the prevailing aphorisms are deceptively simple — which brings me to the second lesson to be derived from this series (other than the masses and masses of information contained within it, of course).

Lesson #2: it’s profoundly important that an aspiring writer learns that the prevailing wisdom is the bouillon version, not the broth itself.

In other words, there’s a whole lot more to know about getting published than the brevity of the usual saws imply. I firmly believe that the combination of those over-concentrated pieces of advice that every writer has heard — the full range from basic writing tips like write what you know and show, don’t tell to the types of things agents and editors like to say at writers’ conferences like good writing will always find a home and it all depends on the writing — with the flat-out wrong popular conception that any genuinely good book will automatically find a publisher instantly very often leads good writers to waste time along the road to publication.

Or, even worse, to assume that if their manuscripts don’t get picked up right away, the problem must be in the quality of the writing.

These conclusions are completely understandable, of course: it’s what the truisms have taught us all to believe. But they are not the whole story, any more than a packet of bouillon is a vat of delicious soup.

Am I being profound, you’re probably wondering, or am I merely hungry? A little of both, I expect. Yet because I have dropped so much potentially quite intimidating information about how books typically get published upon all of you so quickly, I would imagine that the comparatively simple standard aphorisms might be sounding pretty good right about now.

I could bore you all at this juncture with some ennobling platitudes of my own about knowledge being power and valuable for its own sake — see my earlier comment about taking the professor out of the girl — but I’m not going to do that. Anyone with the dedication to have plowed through this, let’s face it, often-depressing series doesn’t need that pep talk. And you’re all bright enough, I’m sure, to have picked up from my SUBTLE HINTS throughout this series that the archive list at right is so extensively categorized precisely so my readers may find answers to specific practical questions as they come up.

Instead, I’m going to posit Lesson #3: the primary reason that it often takes even excellent manuscripts quite a long time to find agents and a home with a major publisher is that this process is hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably either trying to promote a book or classes on how to get published — or is attempting to encourage all of the discouraged good writers out there to keep on going in the face of some pretty steep odds.

Here’s an aphorism that you’re unlikely to hear at a writers’ conference that is nevertheless true: most aspiring writers give up on finding a home for their manuscripts too quickly. Given how deeply affected by mercurial market fads agents’ and editors’ choices necessarily are, that’s truly a shame. Especially right now, when the economy is forcing the major publishing houses to be even more cautious in what they acquire than usual.

In other words: hang in there. To produce some bouillon of my own, the manuscript that gets rejected today may well not be the one that will get rejected a year or two from now.

But some of you may not be willing to wait that long to see your books in print. This, too, would be completely understandable: contrary to what agents often seem to believe, most aspiring writers care more about having their writing available for others to read than about making scads of money on the deal.

Which is why, in case those of you with agents have been wondering, it makes perfect sense to an agent to set aside a manuscript that he professes to love if it doesn’t elicit a fairly lucrative offer in its first circulation, in favor of marketing a client’s next book. In the agent’s mind, the first book hasn’t been discarded; it’s merely waiting to be part of a future multi-book deal. If an agent thinks a writer has a voice that might hit it big someday, continuing to market that first manuscript to smaller or regional presses might seem like a bad career move, even though going with a smaller press might bring the book into print years earlier. (If this paragraph sounds like gibberish to you, you might want to go back and re-read the earlier posts in this series.)

Obviously, this is not necessarily logic that would make sense to a frustrated writer, particularly one who may have spent years landing that agent. Heck, even the expectation that there would be a second book ready to go by the time a handful of editors at big publishing houses have had a chance to take a gander at the first would make a lot of aspiring writers turn pale.

If not actually lose their respective lunches. Especially a writer who might have only intended to write one book in the first place.

Which might not even occur to an agent excited by a new author’s voice, by the way; there’s a reason that “So, what’s your next book?” is such a common question even before the ink is dry on the representation contract. Since even authors whose books are released by major publishers seldom make enough to quit their day jobs — remember, few books are bestsellers — planning to write several marketable books makes very good career sense for a writer who wants to make a living at it.

The fact is, though, that’s not every aspiring writer’s goal. If getting that first — and possibly only — book into print is a writer’s highest priority, investing a great deal of time and energy in landing an agent might not seem like a reasonable trade-off. Others may feel that the large or mid-sized publisher route isn’t for them, or not be too thrilled about the prospect of an agent’s insisting upon changes to the manuscript in order to render it more marketable to the majors.

The good news is that there are other options — and I imagine those of you who have been sufficiently virtuous to keep working through this series’ concentrated account will be overjoyed to hear that a great deal of what I’ve said so far will not apply to the last two sub-topics on our publishing hit parade: publishing through a small house and self-publishing.

No need to conceal your joy; I know, I know.

For the rest of today’s post, I’m going to be talking about the various stripes of small publisher. So for the vast majority of you who have your heart set on a contract with a major publisher, take the rest of the day off.

The small publishing house
Also known as an independent publisher because they are not affiliated with any of the major publishing houses (as imprints are), small presses are often willing to work with authors directly, rather than insisting upon receiving submissions only through agents. Going this route can sometimes pay off big time for an author: in recent years, some of the most exciting new fiction has started its printed life at a small press and gotten picked up later by a major publisher.

And because some of you will be able to think of nothing else until I answer the question you just mentally screamed two sentences ago, one approaches them precisely as one does an agent: after having done some research on who publishes what, find out how they prefer to be approached, and send a query. (Both the Herman Guide and Writer’s Market have good listings of reputable small publishers.)

In other words: as with an agency, it’s never a good idea to send unsolicited manuscripts. Ask first.

I cannot stress sufficiently how important doing your homework is — many an aspiring writer has wasted time and resources approaching a major house’s imprint in the mistaken impression that it’s an independent press, ending up summarily rejected. Check the copyright page of a published book to see if the press that produced it is an indie or an imprint of a larger house.

Also, it’s important to select a small press that has a track record of publishing books like yours before you approach. Rather than publishing across a wide variety of book categories, the smaller publishing house tends to specialize. This often turns out to be a plus for authors, as targeting a narrow market often means that a small press can afford to take more chances in what it acquires.

Why can they afford to take more chances, you ask with bated breath? Generally speaking, because their print runs are smaller and they spend less on promotion.

Translation: the advance is often small or non-existent. (For an explanation of how the size of the initial print run affects the size of the author’s advance, please see the ADVANCES category on the archive list at right.) Also, the author usually ends up arranging the book tour himself. (While I’m referring you elsewhere, tor some useful tips on posts about how one might go about doing that, check out the posts by guest blogger Michael Schein beginning here.)

In fact, over the last couple of years, it’s gotten downright common for small publishers, especially those who market primarily online, to employ the print-on-demand (POD) method, rather than producing a large initial print run, as the major houses do, and placing it in bookstores. (For an explanation of how print-on-demand works, please see the aptly-named PRINT ON DEMAND category on the archive list at right. Hey, I told you that it was broken down into very specific topics!)

Check about this in advance, because POD carries some definite marketing drawbacks: POD books have an infinitely more difficult time getting reviewed (check out the GETTING A BOOK REVIEWED category for more details), and most US libraries have strict policies against buying POD books. So do some bookstore chains that shall remain nameless. (They know who they are!) Even some online retailers won’t carry POD books.

Why, you exclaim in horror? Well, for a lot of reasons, but mostly for because POD still carries a certain stigma; many, many bookbuyers who should know better by now still regard POD as the inevitable marker of a self-published book. More on why that might be problematic follows next time — for now, what you need to know is that a small publisher that does not go the POD route is going to have an easier time placing your book on shelves and into the hands of your future readers.

On the bright side, an author often has much more input into the publication process at a small press than a large one. Because it is a less departmentalized operation than a major publishing house, editors at indie presses often have the time to work more intensively with their authors. For a first-time author who gets picked up by a really good editor, this can be a very positive experience.

It can also, perversely, render an author more attractive to agents and editors at the majors when he’s trying to market his next book. (Since indie presses seldom have much money to toss around, multi-book contracts are rare; see that earlier comment about miniscule advances.) A recommendation from an editor will give you a definite advantage in the querying stage: a query beginning, Editor Y of Small Publisher X recommended that I contact you about representing my book… is probably going to get a pretty close reading from any agent’s Millicent.

Why? Well, having a successful track record of pleasing an editor at an indie press is a selling point; as those of you who recall my GETTING GOOD AT ACCEPTING FEEDBACK series may recall, not all authors are equally receptive to editorial commentary. Also, from an agent’s point of view, the fact that there is already an editor at a press out there who is predisposed to read and admire your work automatically means her job will be easier — if the majors pass on book #2, the editor who worked on book #1 probably will not.

Which is to say: if your first book with a small press does well, they will probably want you to stick around — and might become a trifle defensive if you start looking for an agent for book #2, especially if it is a press that ONLY works with unagented authors, or who prefers to do so. Such presses are rare, but they do exist; it is undoubtedly cheaper to work with unagented writers (again, see that earlier comment about advances). If this is their policy, however, they have set up a situation where their authors HAVE to leave them in order to pursue their careers. Consequently, they expect it.

However, people who work for small presses also understand that it’s far from uncommon for a writer to start out at a small press and move up to a big one with the help of an agent. Actually, the more successful they are at promoting your first book, the more they could logically expect you to move onward and upward. Authors move from press to press all the time, without any hard feelings, and when well-meaning industry professionals genuinely respect an author, the last thing they want to do is to harm their future books’ chances of commercial success. In fact, if your subsequent books do well, the small press will benefit, because new readers will come looking for copies of your first book.

Everybody wins, in short.

That being said, a right of first refusal clause over your next book is a fairly standard contractual provision. In essence, it means that when you sold the first book, you agreed to let them look at it before any other publisher does. They already know that they like your writing (which means that it is not at all presumptuous for you to assume that they might want your next, incidentally), and they would rather not have to compete in order to retain you.

Translation: you might not see an advance for your next book, either. But if getting your work out there is your primary priority, is that really going to annoy you all that much?

The regional publishing house
This is industry-speak for small publishers located outside the publishing capitals of the world — unless you happen to be talking to someone who works at a major NYC agency or publishing house, in which case pretty much any West Coast publisher would fall into the regional category. Sometimes, these presses are affiliated with universities, but many are not.

I bring up conversational use of the term advisedly: if you’ve attended any reasonably large writers’ conference within the last two decades, you’ve probably heard at least one agent or editor talking about regional publishing houses as an alternative to the major publishers. Specifically, you may have heard them answer an attendee’s question with something along the lines of, “Well, I wouldn’t be interested in a romantic thriller about wild salmon conservation, but you might try a Pacific Northwest regional press.”

If you’re like most conference attendees, this probably felt like a brush-off — which, in fairness, it almost certainly was. Most NYC-based agents who deal with major publisher houses prefer to concentrate on books (particularly novels) that have what they call national interest, rather than mere regional appeal.

Basically, national interest means that a book might reasonably be expected to attract readers from all across the country; books with regional appeal, by contrast, might have a fairly substantial market, but it would be concentrated in one part of the country. Or, to put it another way, books of national interest will strike agents and editors in New York City (or, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, and/or Chicago) as universally appealing.

Interestingly, books set in any of the boroughs of New York are almost never deemed of merely regional interest, even though novels set in Brooklyn do not, as a group, enjoy a demonstrably higher demand than those set in, say, Minneapolis. As far as I know, readers in Phoenix have not been storming bookstores, clamoring for greater insight into daily life in Queens, Chelsea, or Ozone Park. Yet it’s undeniable that many a Manhattan-based agent or editor would find such insights more accessible than those of the fine citizenry of eastern Nevada or the wilds of British Columbia. (Remember, it’s not all that uncommon for an NYC based agent or editor (as well as their respective Millicents) never to lived anywhere but the upper eastern seaboard of the United States.)

Here’s another bit of bouillon for you: regional marketability, like beauty, most definitely resides in the eye of the beholder.

Which is precisely why a writer of a book with strong regional appeal should consider approaching a local small publisher — which, in most cases, means the local publisher — or at any rate one based in your time zone. A book on homelessness in San Francisco may well strike a Bay Area editor as being of broad interest in a way that it simply wouldn’t to an agent in Manhattan.

That recognition doesn’t necessarily mean that a regional press will be able to get such a book national exposure (although it’s been known to happen.) Like other small publishers, presses that concentrate on a particular part of the country usually don’t have much money for book promotion; what they have tends to be concentrated within a small geographical area. For some books, this works beautifully, but it’s unlikely to land an author on the New York Times’ bestseller list.

Fair warning: contrary to the agent’s comment I reported above, few regional presses actually publish fiction these days, at least in novel form. (Some presses who specialize in regional nonfiction do publish short story collections; others will publish regional children’s books.) Again, you’re going to want to do your homework before you query or submit.

At least more homework than the agent who dismissed the Pacific Northwest novelist above. Given that regional presses have mostly been concentrating on nonfiction for a couple of decades now, I’m not sure why pros at conferences so frequently glibly refer aspiring novelists in their direction.

Speaking of shifts in publishing, there’s something else you might want to know about approaching a small publisher.

Remember how I had said that things change? Well…
As pretty much any writer whose agent has been circulating a book for her recently could tell you (but might not, for fear of jinxing the submission process), selling a book to a major publisher has gotten a heck of a lot harder in recent months. So much so that agents who might not otherwise have considered taking their clients’ work to an indie publisher a year or two ago have been thinking about it very seriously indeed.

More importantly for those of you who might be considering approaching a small publisher on your own behalf, some of them are actually doing it.

What does that mean for the unagented writer? Well, more competition, among other things, and often more polished competition. Also, as you may recall from earlier in this series, reputable agents only make money when they sell their clients’ books, so it’s very much in their interest to try to haggle up the advances on books sold to small publishers.

In a company where there isn’t, as I mentioned above, much money to throw toward authors, guess what that tends to mean for the advances available for unagented books? Uh-huh. But again, if your primary goal is to see your work in print, is that necessarily a deal-breaker?

Speaking of money, do make sure before you submit to a small publisher that it isn’t a subsidy press, one that requires authors to put up some percentage of the costs of publication. Unfortunately, not all subsidy publishers are up front about this; the latter’s websites can look awfully similar to the former’s. Before you cough up even one red cent — or, ideally, before you approach them at all — check with Preditors and Editors to see whether the publisher charges fees.

And if chipping in to get your book published sounds like a reasonable idea to you, just you wait until next time, when I’ll be talking about self-publishing.

In any case, you’re going to want to proceed with care — and do your homework. Naturally, this swift overview isn’t the last word on small publishers: as I said, an aspiring writer thinking about going that route should do extensive research on the subject. One of the best places to start: hie yourself to a well-stocked bookstore, start pulling books in your category off the shelves, and see who published them. Then find out whether any of those presses are open to queries from unagented authors.

Keep up the good work!

bunny-eggPS: yes, I know that this series has been long and dense, but I have a fabulous reward in store for you at the end of it: a guest post from an author I’ve been eager to get here to talk to you for a very long time. Hint: he’s funny, and appropriately for the season, there will be small, fluffy animals involved.

Bringing a memoir to successful publication at an indie press, by Arleen Williams, guest blogger

Hello, campers –
After spending a long, hard few days slogging through the nitty-gritty of how to get a manuscript out the door to an agent or small press — and an even harder couple of days talking about the stresses of doing so — I have an aptly-timed treat for you today, a guest blog on, you guessed it, submitting a memoir to an indie press by one of the bravest memoirists I know, Arleen Williams. Her memoir, THE THIRTY-NINTH VICTIM, was published recently Blue Feather Press.

Naturally, it takes genuine bravery to write any memoir honestly — speaking as a memoirist myself, I had absolutely no idea how emotionally difficult it is to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth on a page intended for publication until I did it myself, or, more precisely, until the editor who had acquired it started asking me to change things.

But Arleen’s situation was, unfortunately, the stuff of nightmares: her little sister, Maureen, was murdered by the worst serial killer in American history. In case any of you missed my enthusiastic cheers when the book came out last April, here is the official blurb:

The Green River murders were headline news throughout the 1980s. By the time the perpetrator was sentenced in 2003, at least 48 young women had met an untimely death at his hands. What started as as string of local killings in Seattle became a national nightmare before it was over. In homes all across America, television news programs and newspapers large and small carried feature stories about the ever-growing list of victims.

Now imagine that during this time, someone you love — your baby sister, a beautiful young woman of 19 — suddenly goes missing. The police are at best unhelpful, and at worst, seemingly uninterested in what’s happened to her. And then comes word you hoped you’d never receive: your youngest sister’s remains have been found. She is yet another victim of the Green River killer. With amazing candor, Arleen Williams tells the story of her family’s journey, before and after the Green River killer murdered her sister Maureen and left her body in a stretch of wilderness off the west side of Highway 18.

What amazed me about Arleen’s memoir is that instead of approaching this horror as true crime — which, frankly, would probably have been easier to write — she embeds the reader in her family’s dynamics in the years leading up to Maureen’s disappearance, as well as after, making their sense of disorientation and loss achingly present. Intriguingly, their interactions are not at all the sanitized, made-for-TV-type family dynamics readers have come to expect from third-hand accounts, but a micro-culture of selective recognition and unanticipated temporary banishments for minor infractions that renders the family strangely equipped — and painfully unequipped — to deal with Maureen’s permanent disappearance.

I don’t want to give too much away, of course, but let me tell you, denial has seldom been so fascinating.

(For a more extensive peek into the memoir’s world, there’s a video about it on her website. And in case you’re wondering, THE THIRTY-NINTH VICTIM may be purchased directly from the publisher, Blue Feather Press, or on Amazon. If you happen to live in the southeastern portion of this fine country, you may have Arleen sign a copy for you at her upcoming readings:

Wordsmiths, Decatur, Georgia
December 15, 7:30 pm

Vino Loco, Englewood, Florida
December 20, 4 pm

I just mention.)

Remember how I was saying yesterday that it often takes a long time for even an excellent manuscript to see print? I believe that Arleen is going to have a thing or two to say about that. Aspiring memoirists will find this guest post helpful, too, as will anyone out there considering working with a small press.

But mostly, I’m thrilled to post this because, frankly, those of you who are writing on dark topics couldn’t possibly hope for a better-suited advice-giver. Please join me, then, in welcoming Arleen Williams as today’s guest blogger.

Take it away, Arleen!

How did a middle-aged straight woman get a memoir published by a small press with a lesbian fiction focus? This is a question I am often asked in one form or another. It’s a sort of how and why question, I suppose. So here’s the answer I tell readers and fellow writers alike: it took relentless determination and a whole lot of luck.

I wrote a story that I felt needed to be told. I took the classes and followed the rules – buying how-to books, reading blogs like this one, honing my query letter, going to conferences. I sent out over fifty agent queries. The responses ranged from harshly impersonal to expressions of heartfelt sorrow for my loss.

What they all shared was that note of rejection. Some included comments suggesting that I make the book more about my sister’s murderer, about the Green River case. Others claimed readers didn’t want a story told from a victim’s perspective.

So what to do? I wasn’t writing true crime or thriller. I wasn’t willing to change from the memoir format that I had chosen. I had two alternatives: self-publish or find an independent press. I opted for the latter and started querying every publisher listed in Writer’s Market that accepted memoir and unagented manuscripts.

After nine months of sending out queries and enduring rejections, I got lucky. I was offered a contract, but my luck ran out again when the company holding my contract was bought out before my book was published.

Unwilling to give up, stubborn determination came into play. I contacted the new company and asked if they intended to honor my contract. That was when my love affair with small, independent publishers began. I was able to talk with them, actually e-mail and get prompt responses.

And they wanted my memoir. Why?

Curious, I asked Emily Reed, co-owner of Blue Feather Books, Ltd., that same question. Why would a small niche publisher of predominately lesbian lit want a straight memoir? Simple answer: they liked it and they thought they could sell it. They publish books by women and for women. They were willing to take a chance on me.

I cannot say enough positive about working through the pre-publication revision and editing process with a small press. It was one-on-one, personal and real. I have developed a lifelong friendship with an editor who lives across the country from me. Jane Vollbrecht (my editor for The Thirty-Ninth Victim) and I will meet for the first time later this month when I do a reading in her city. Our relationship developed through respect, honesty and her willingness to share her story with me as we edited my own.

For the final line-by-line editing, Caitlin d’Aguiar, another of Blue Feather’s owners, and I met for a nine- or ten-hour marathon at a roadside Denny’s halfway between her home and my own. Again, it was personal and real. I have never worked with a New York publisher or an agent of any kind, but I’ve had conversations with many authors and their experiences seem to be very different from my own.

It sounds rosy, doesn’t it? The communication and connection. The e-mail, phone and face-to-face interaction with editor and publishers, but there is a downside to working with a small independent press.

Isn’t there always a downside?

I’ve always written, scribbling in journals for as long as I can remember, and like most, I write because I must, because it’s in my blood, because it’s my way of processing my world. When I began to write The Thirty-Ninth Victim in fall 2001, the thought of publication did not enter into the equation. I wrote because I needed to write. Nothing more. Later, when a draft began to take shape, it was a pair of dedicated teachers – Robert Ray and Jack Remick – who encouraged me to pursue publication, who felt that I had a body of work worthy of publication.

I explain all of this only to say that like most, I write for me, I write because I love to write. Never, in all my years of writing, in my wildest dreams, did I see myself in the role of book seller. And yet, that is precisely the role one falls into by publishing with a small press, particularly a press that does print-on-demand (POD) sales.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you won’t be promoting your own book if you publish with a large New York house. Of course you will. Publishers have extremely limited promotional budgets, the bulk of which goes into promoting a very small number of pet projects. Most small presses have little to no promotional budget.

In both cases, most authors are on their own to promote their book, to set up bookstore and library readings, to secure media and on-line coverage. In short, to be their own (or to hire) publicity person. In that sense, publishing with a large or small house doesn’t differ much.

The difference lies in how a book is printed and distributed. Many small publishers, including my own, operate on a POD basis. It’s the only way they can survive economically, and yet because of this, most of the large bookstores won’t carry their books. If bookstores can’t purchase large orders with guaranteed buy back, they don’t buy.

For that reason, if you were to go into any major book retailer and request The Thirty-Ninth Victim, they’d be happy to order a copy for you, but you won’t find it on the shelves or on one of those wonderful tables displaying new books. A bookstore browser, a holiday shopper, will never see my book.

Though I didn’t know any of this when I signed my first publishing contract, it probably wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. I was tired of rejection, and I was thrilled, as most writers are, to simply land a contract. In the intervening months since my memoir was released, I have become PR person, public speaker and book seller – all roles I never imagined for myself.

The selling part is the hardest for me. If your book is in bookstores, your role is limited to publicity. But when bookstores are unwilling to stock your book, you turn to the indie stores and often enter the world of consignment sales. You find yourself weighing the cost of the books you must purchase from your publisher against the odds of being able to sell them. You finding yourself setting prices based on your break even point in a feeble attempt to stop bleeding money. And you begin asking yourself if selling your book will ever become more than an expensive hobby.

So I’m not saying there’s a huge difference between the author’s role in promoting a book published by a large house vs. a small press, but I am saying that it is harder if your book is POD. In that case, it is essential to rely on your personal and professional networks to get word out about your work.

Along those lines, I want to thank Anne Mini for her invitation to do this guest entry on her blog. I appreciate the opportunity to share my experiences with Anne’s readers and, of course, to invite you to visit my website to learn more about my work.

I sent my first agent query in March 2004. Wide-eyed, naïve and full of hope. The Thirty-Ninth Victim was released in April 2008. It was a long journey – one I am honored to have had the opportunity to take. I wish you all the best on your own publishing journeys.

Arleen Williams has been recording her life in journals since she left home in her late teens. Her wanderings took her to Mexico City, where she completed a bachelor’s degree through the University of California while earning a teaching certificate from the National University of Mexico. Arleen has been teaching the English language for over thirty years. She taught international students living in dorms in Seattle, and migratory workers in her living room in Santa Cruz, California. In Caracas, Venezuela, she faked an Irish accent in order to land a position at the British Embassy School, and in Mexico City, her high school students encircled her for her protection during an anti-American protest.

In 1984, the disappearance of her youngest sister brought her back to Seattle. Later, she completed a master’s degree in education at the University of Washington and accepted the teaching position she still holds at South Seattle Community College. For the past fifteen years, she and her husband have been remodeling a small 1941 home in West Seattle, where they have raised their only daughter. The Thirty-Ninth Victim is her first book.

The small press dilemma

For those of you who missed it, excellent and faithful reader MooCrazy wrote in a few days ago about a concern shared by many writers: the dilemma about how to handle desirable career transitions when dealing with a small press. Quoth Moo:

“Would you please speak to the issue of finding an agent after an author has published a first book through a traditional publisher without one? I love my current publisher, a small regional press. They claim the feeling is mutual. (I make a point of being very easy to work with.) However, I want to make sure my next book – a romp through a farm, similar to Bob Tarte’s “Enslaved by Ducks” – is represented by an agent because it is possibly national, even international in appeal. Should I stick with the publisher I love but try to interest an agent anyway? Will my publisher think it is bad manners to bring an agent in? They’ve already invited me to submit again. I don’t want it to appear that I don’t appreciate and trust them. Of course, there’s always the chance they won’t even like this book. It would be presumptuous of me to assume so.”

Moo, I hear you, and I’m glad you brought this up. I have heard some version of this concern from practically every author I have ever known who went through a small press. You don’t want to ruin the relationship, naturally, but you don’t want to limit your future books a press that may not have the distribution capacity to help your career grow in the long term. You want to be loyal to people who have been nice to you, but you would like to have your future books make a bit more of a splash. You don’t want to alienate those who may be your best chance at publication for the next book, but you are well aware that that prime face-out space on bookshelves and very visible table displays at the major bookstore chains are leased by the big publishing houses.

Here’s a short answer to the dilemma: last time I checked, Bob Tarte was represented by the recently-visiting-in-this-neck-of-the-woods Jeff Kleinman; his clients speak well of him. I have no idea if he would like your book project, but I suspect he would respond with sensitivity to a query letter that began, “I enjoyed hearing you speak at the recent PNWA conference.” (Don’t say this if it isn’t true, of course.) Since you so ably represented Bob Tarte’s excellent ENSLAVED BY DUCKS, I believe you will be interested in my book. While I already have an ongoing relationship with Small Publisher X, who printed my last book, I am eager to seek a broader audience for my work.” Why not test this supposition by sending off such a letter right away?

Before I go into all the reasons that this might be a good idea, let me run through why such an opening might be effective. That, from an agent’s point of view, is a pretty alluring opening paragraph to a query letter. It says that you’ve already taken the time to do some professional development for yourself as a writer, by going to a conference; it recognizes him for his past professional efforts, and ties those efforts to your work, and last, but certainly not least, it tells the agent that you already have publication credits. What’s not to love?

Yes, I know: this reads as though I am evading the central issue, which is whether small publishers get annoyed when their authors try to agent up. But in order to understand the prevailing industry attitudes about this, it’s important to understand why an agent would not see ANY ethical problem to picking up a writer who already has a self-negotiated contract with a small press.

Why? Well, in industry terms, there honestly would be no problem whatsoever: it’s understood that career writers often begin with small presses and move up to big ones. It’s also understood that to deal with the large presses, a writer will need an agent. Just as no one in professional baseball would expect a very gifted minor league player to remain with his original team when a major league club beckoned, it would actually surprise most publishing professionals if a serious writer DID stay with a very small press purely out of loyalty.

So from an agent’s POV, all your having a pre-existing relationship with a small publisher means is two things: first, that you have a successful track record of pleasing an editor (which is a selling point that he can use to try to pitch your work to the majors), and second, that there is already an editor at a press out there who is predisposed to read and admire your work (which means his job will be easier). This is going to make you a very attractive client prospect.

But will your publisher become annoyed if you shop your next book around to agents before you show it to them? Well, there certainly are unreasonably jealous people out there, but people who work for small presses also understand that it’s far from uncommon for a writer to start out at a small press and move up to a big one with the help of an agent. Actually, the more successful they are at promoting your first book, the more they could logically expect you to move onward and upward.

They know, in short, that your wanting to find an agent is not a reflection upon your relationship with them, but merely a practical attempt on your part to enhance your work’s visibility. If they are a credible house (and it sounds as though they are), this will have no effect upon your reputation whatsoever. Authors move from press to press all the time, without any hard feelings, and when well-meaning industry professionals genuinely respect an author, the last thing they want to do is to harm their future books’ chances of commercial success. In fact, if your subsequent books do well, the small press will benefit, because new readers will come looking for copies of your first book. Everybody wins.

Yes, I know: there is a LOT of talk on the conference circuit about writers being blacklisted, but actually, it doesn’t happen very often. In my experience, there are only three situations where presses tend to become mortally offended if their authors seek representation for their next books — and generally speaking, the mortally offended and the genuinely sociopathic are the only people you need to worry about bad-mouthing you. (I’m tempted to digress into diagnosing the motives of the people who have been threatening to sue over my memoir here, but I shan’t.)

What are these terrible instances? First, if it is a press that ONLY works with unagented authors, or who prefers to do so. Such presses are rare, but they do exist; it is undoubtedly cheaper to work with unagented writers. If this is their policy, however, they have set up a situation where their authors HAVE to leave them in order to pursue their careers. Consequently, they expect it.

When such a publisher becomes annoyed with an author for seeking representation, it is only because he was counting upon making more money on any given author before she moved up to the majors. But if a major press where you want to be, it just doesn’t make sense to stick with a press with that kind of policy anyway, does it?

The second instance is where the publication contract for the first book contained a right of first refusal clause over your next book. This is a fairly standard contractual provision, so you should check for it. In essence, it means that when you sold the first book, you agreed to let them look at it before any other publisher does. They already know that they like your writing (which means that it is not at all presumptuous for you to assume that they might want your next, incidentally), and they would rather not have to compete in order to retain you.

If you have such a clause in your first book’s contract, it would not prevent you from sending your next book out to agents. All it would mean is that any agent who did sign you would be legally obligated to show the book to your publisher before shopping it around. It just means that you would have to be honest with the agent about the obligation. You would land the agent, the agent would approach your publisher, and everyone would be happy.

The third situation — and honestly, one hears about it anecdotally far more than it occurs in real life — is where the editor who handled the first book has already heard about the next book and loved it, or has become friendly with the author to the extent that it never occurred to him that you might move on to another press, or who had just assumed that all of their authors are there for a lifetime, or who has fallen so deeply in love with you as to be beyond the reach of ordinary common sense. In short, these are instances where there is either a personal relationship between the author and the editor or publisher — or a dementia on someone’s part that there IS a personal relationship strong enough that it would transcend the norms of the industry.

Truly, there is absolutely nothing you can do about other people’s assumptions. If people at your press decide to be offended at your serving your work’s best interests, though, you might want to give some thought about whether this is the best place for your work in the long term. As an author, your top loyalty needs to be to your books, not to your publisher.

Since you say that you have a good relationship with the fine folks at your publishing house, though, you probably do not need to worry about this. If they’re reasonable people who know the industry, and you’ve been a dream to work with, chances are that they will be pleased if you do well with your next book.

However, if you are seriously worried, here is a close-to-foolproof method for avoiding insulting even the touchiest publishing type: flatter him or her by asking for advice. Send your editor an e-mail, saying that while obviously you would LOVE to have Small Publisher X print your next work, you’ve become aware that for the benefit of your overall writing career, it would make sense for your to seek an agent. Since ideally the editor will be working with any agent you might find, does the editor have any suggestions about whom to query?

This method has two benefits: it diffuses the situation (after all, you ARE being honest, so if the editor want to snap up your next book, s/he knows that s/he will have to take action, pronto) AND it potentially gives you that opportunity to send a query beginning, “Editor Y of Small Publisher X recommended that I contact you about representing my book…” Editors often have agents with whom they prefer to work, and vice versa. A recommendation from an editor will give you a definite advantage in the querying stage.

All that being said, I do think that writers worry too much about offending agents, editors, and publishers — or rather, that the writers who DO end up offending publishing professionals are seldom the ones who sit around worrying about it. The really offensive authors are the ones who don’t meet deadlines, or are rude about editing suggestions, or disappear for a year under the pretext of a rewrite, or don’t live up to promotional obligations, or who call their agents (or prospective agents) three times a week for updates. Trust me, nice writers like you who do everything in their power to be helpful and provide good books are not the ones whom editors and agents curse behind their backs. It’s the other ones, the ones who (I like to think, anyway) do not read my blog.

Remember, your publisher did not do you a FAVOR by publishing your book – your publisher published your book because the staff there thought it could make money and serve art doing it. However cordial your relationship with everyone there, it is in fact a business relationship. These are people who make their living off the talent of writers like you. Most of them are aware of it.

So why do almost all of us tiptoe around these people as though our very existence were cause for apology, although THEY live on OUR work? Well, it’s a pretty common reaction in a situation where one person holds disproportionate power over another.

Of course it is true that an offended agent tends not to sign the writer who offended her, any more than an affronted editor will rush to work with an agent with whom he’s just had a screaming fight. And naturally, you don’t want to impress an agent you want to sign you as a worrywart who will require constant attention from the moment the ink is dry on the contract. But as long as you are polite and respectful both before and after ink is put to paper, doing your job well and allowing them to do theirs, you will usually be fine.

Hope this helps, Moo. And keep up the good work, everybody!