Category: *Start here if you are a beginner at trying to get published

Okay, time for the final installment of my holiday gift to my readers: an extended series on how to increase your chances in literary competitions. Today’s installment deals with the fun stuff, the last-minute touches that can give your entry an edge. (Incidentally, many of these presentation tips work beautifully with query letters and manuscript submission, too.)

When you first read through contest rules, it may not seem as though they allow a great deal of leeway in how you package your work, but often, there is some wiggle room. If so, proportion can make a difference in how your work is received.

Take a look at your entry: does the synopsis seem disproportionately long? Is there good writing that you would be able to squeeze into the chapter if it were shorter?

If your synopsis runneth over its assigned page limit, try this trick: minimize the amount of space you devote to the book’s premise and the actions that occur in Chapter 1. Yes, you will need this information to appear prominently in a synopsis you would show an editor or agent, but you have different goals here. If you are submitting Chapter 1 (or even beyond) as part of your contest entry, and if you place the chapter BEFORE the synopsis in your entry packet, the judges will already be familiar with both the initial premise AND the basic characters AND what occurs at the beginning in the book. So why be repetitious?

In the average novel synopsis, over a quarter of the text deals with premise and character introduction. Trim this down to just a few sentences and move on to the rest of the plot.

Allow me to use a practical example. Let’s say that you were Jane Austen, and you were submitting the first 25 pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY to a literary contest. (You should be so lucky!) For submission to an agent, your query synopsis might look something like this:

ELINOR (19) and MARIANNE DASHWOOD (17) are in a pitiable position: due to the whimsical will of their great-uncle, the family estate passes at the death of their wealthy father into the hands of their greedy half-brother, JOHN DASHWOOD (early 30s). Their affectionate but impractical mother (MRS. DASHWOOD, 40), soon offended at John’s wife’s (FANNY FERRARS DASHWOOD, late 20s) domineering ways and lack of true hospitality, wishes to move her daughters from Norland, the only home they have ever known, but comparative poverty and the fact that Elinor is rapidly falling in love with her sister-in-law’s brother, EDWARD FERRARS (mid-20s), render any decision on where to go beyond the reach of her highly romantic speculations. Yet when John and his wife talk themselves out of providing any financial assistance to the female Dashwoods at all, Mrs. Dashwood accepts the offer of her cousin, SIR JOHN MIDDLETON (middle aged) to move her family to Barton Park, hundreds of miles away. Once settled there, the Dashwoods find themselves rushed into an almost daily intimacy with Sir John and his wife, LADY MIDDLETON (late 20s) at the great house. There, they meet COLONEL BRANDON (early 40s), Sir John’s melancholy friend, who seems struck by Marianne’s musical ability — and beauty. But does his sad face conceal a secret?

Now, all of this does in fact occur in the first 25 pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, as the contest entry would clearly show. So, being a wise Aunt Jane, you would streamline the contest synopsis so it looked a bit more like this:

At the death of their wealthy father, ELINOR (19) and MARIANNE DASHWOOD (17) and their affectionate but impractical mother (MRS. DASHWOOD, 40) are forced to leave their life-long home and move halfway across England, to live near relatives they have never seen, far away from Elinor’s beloved EDWARD FERRARS (mid-20s). At the home of their cousins SIR JOHN (middle aged) and LADY MIDDLETON (late 20s), melancholy COLONEL BRANDON (early 40s), seems struck by Marianne’s musical ability — and beauty. But does his sad face conceal a secret?

Less than half the length, but enough of the point to show the judges how the submitted chapters feed into the rest of the book. Well done, Jane!

Placing character names in capital letters and indicating ages (as I have done above), is no longer standard for querying synopses — but not all contest judges seem to be aware of that. To old-fashioned eyes, a synopsis simply isn’t professional unless the first time each major character is named, HIS NAME APPEARS IN ALL CAPS (age). Here again, you would be perfectly within your rights not to adhere to this quaint practice, but if your work happens to fall into the hands of a judge who thinks it’s mandatory, you’ll be far better off if you stuck to old-fashioned structure.

And naturally, you should read the ENTIRETY of your entry IN HARD COPY, ALOUD, before you send it anywhere. As regular readers of this blog are already aware, my professional editor hat gets all in a twist at the notion of any writer’s proofreading solely on a computer screen.

And don’t even get me started on the chronic inadequacies of most word processing programs’ grammar checkers! Mine disapproves of gerunds, apparently on general principle, strips accent marks off French words, and regularly advises me to use the wrong form of THERE. (If anybody out there does not know the ABSOLUTELY IMMUTABLE rules governing when to use THERE, THEIR, AND THEY’RE, drop me a comment, and I shall make everything clear.) Like a bad therapist, a poor grammar checker cannot be sufficiently disregarded, but even in the unlikely event that your grammar checker was put together by someone remotely familiar with the English language as she is spoke, you should NEVER rely solely upon what it tells you to do. If you’re in doubt, look it up.

There is another excellent reason to read the synopsis out loud: to make sure it stands alone as a story. Since part of the point of the synopsis is to demonstrate what a good storyteller you are, flow is obviously important. If you have even the tiniest reservations about whether you have achieved this goal, read your synopsis out loud to someone unfamiliar with your project — and then ask your listener to tell the basis story back to you. If there are holes in your account, this method will make them leap out at you. (Insofar as a hole can leap.)

Once you have perfected your entry, print it on nice paper. This may seem silly, but it sometimes does make a difference, believe it or not.

By nice paper, I’m not talking about hot pink sheets or pages that you have hand-calligraphed with gold leaf and Celtic designs. Either of those would get your entry disqualified on sight. No, I mean high-quality white paper, the kind of stuff you might print your resume on if you REALLY wanted the job.

If this seems extravagant to you, ask yourself: have I ever walked into an interview wanting the job as much as I want to have my book published?

Using good paper will make your entry stand out amongst the others. Nice paper is a pleasure to hold, but frankly, there’s more to this strategy than giving your judges visceral pleasure. The vast majority of contest entries are printed on very low-quality paper; when multiple copies are required for submission, they generally show up on the flimsy paper so often found in copy shop photocopiers. It tears easily. It wrinkles as it travels through the mail. It’s dingy-looking.

Spring for something nicer, and your entry will automatically come across as more professional to the judges.

It may not be fair, but it’s true, so it’s very worth your while to invest a few extra bucks in a decent ream. 20-pound paper or heavier (I use 24-pound) will not wrinkle in transit unless the envelope is actually folded, and bright white paper gives the impression of being crisper. (Avoid anything in the cream range — this is the time for brilliant white.)

For what it’s worth, I have observed over time that agents and editors, too, seem to treat manuscripts printed in Times New Roman on bright, heavy white paper with more respect than other manuscripts. The only drawback — and it was a significant one — was that when I printed up a draft of my memoir for my editor on lovely cotton 24-pound paper, it came back to me smelling like an ashtray. Turns out cotton paper soaks up ambient smoke like a sponge. My cats shied away from my desk for weeks afterward.

And before you seal the envelope, GO BACK AND REREAD THE CONTEST RULES. Have you met each and every requirement? Have you included every needed element? Are your margins precisely what the contest specified?

It may seem anal-retentive to re-check this often, but as I kept telling you last week, judges are often looking for reasons to disqualify you. It is absolutely imperative, then, that you follow every rule to the letter. And in the average contest, a good 5% of entries show up with something really basic missing, like the check or a second title page.
Good luck with your entries.

Hey, one of my readers suggested to me that it might be a good idea for me to hold a brief seminar on putting the contest entry packet together a week or so before PNWA contest entries are due, to help my Seattle-area readers catch last-minute problems. If you might be interested in such a class, or if you just think it would be a dandy thing to have offered, vote for it by dropping me a line via the COMMENTS function, below, sometime before the end of January. (If you want a personalized notice when it happens, include your e-mail.) If there’s enough interest, I’d be happy to teach it.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

It may seem odd that I hammered so hard yesterday about the importance of a finely-crafted synopsis to a contest entry’s overall chances of winning, but you would be astonished at how often a well-written chapter is accompanied by a synopsis obviously dashed off at the last minute, as though the writing quality, clarity, and organization of it weren’t actually being evaluated at all.

I suspect that this is a fairly accurate reading of what commonly occurs. All too often, writers (most of whom, after all, have full-time jobs and families and, well, lives to lead) push preparing their entries to the very last minute. Frustrated at this crucial moment by what appears to be an arbitrary requirement — it’s the writing in the chapter that counts, right? — it’s tempting to just throw together a synopsis in a fatal rush and shove it into an envelope, hoping that no one will pay much attention to it.

Trust me on this one: judges WILL pay attention to it.

Many a fine chapter has been scuttled by a slipshod synopsis. I won’t go so far as to say that if you do not expend careful consideration over the crafting of the synopsis for a book-length category, you might as well not enter at all. It is entirely fair to say, however, that if you have a well-written, well thought-out synopsis tucked into your entry packet, your work will automatically have an edge toward winning.

Effectively, in a contest situation, the synopsis is the substitute for the rest of the book. The synopsis is where you demonstrate to judges that you are not merely a writer who can hold them in thrall for a few isolated pages: the synopsis is where you show that you have the vision and tenacity to take the compelling characters you have begun to reveal in your first chapter through an interesting story to a satisfying conclusion. The synopsis is where you show that you can plot out a BOOK.

For this reason, it is imperative that your synopsis makes it very, very clear how the chapter or excerpt you are submitting fits into the overall arc of the book, regardless of whether you are submitting fiction or nonfiction. Quite a few contests allow writers to submit chapters other than the first, and if you elect to take them up on this offer, your synopsis had better make it absolutely plain where the excerpts will fall in the finished work.

Truth be told, I think it is seldom wise to submit either non-consecutive excerpts from a book or chapters other than the initial ones, even if later chapters contain writing that is truly wonderful. Non-consecutive excerpts require the judge to make the logical connections between them — which the judge may not be inclined to do in a way that is in your best interest.

An uncharitable judge might, for instance, draw the unkind inference that you had submitted the excerpts you chose because they were the only parts of the book you had written — a poor message to send in a category devoted to book-length works. Or that you simply can’t stand your introductory chapter. Or, a judge may reason, no agent or editor in the world, is going to accept random excerpts from a book for which she’s been queried: she is going to expect to see the first chapter, or first three chapters. Thus, a judge might conclude, the author who submitted this patchwork entry isn’t anywhere near ready to submit work to professionals. Next.

This is not, in short, a situation where it pays to rely upon the kindness of strangers.

If you DO decide to use non-contiguous excerpts, place your synopsis at the BEGINNING of your entry, unless the rules absolutely forbid you to do so, and make sure that the synopsis makes it QUITE clear that these excerpts are far and away the most important part of the book. Basically, the role of the synopsis here is to make the judges EAGER to read these particular excerpts. Obviously, this means that your storytelling skills had better be at their most polished, to meet the challenge.

As for selecting a chapter other than the first for submission, effectively starting midway through the book, I would advise against it, too, even if when contest rules explicitly permit the possibility. In the first place, the judge may well draw the same set of uncharitable inferences as with the non-continuous excerpts, and dismiss your submission as not ready for the big time. (As I have mentioned repeatedly over the last couple of weeks, contest organizers LOVE it when their winners move on quickly to publication. If your work looks like it needs a couple of years’ worth of polishing to become market-ready, it is unlikely to win a contest, even if you are extremely talented.)

In the second place, while your best writing may well lie later in your book, the advantage of starting at the beginning of the book is that the judge and the reader will have an equal amount of information going in. I’ve known a lot of contest judges who resent having to go back and forth between the synopsis and the chapters to figure out what is going on.

There is a sneaky way to get around this — but again, I would have to scold you if you did it. There is no contest in the world that is going to make you sign an affidavit swearing that your entry is identical to what you are submitting to agents and editors; if you win, no one is later going to come after you and say, “Hey, your book doesn’t start with the scene you entered in the contest!”

So? Professional writers change the running orders of their books all the time.

A clever entrant who feels her best writing occurs fifty pages into her novel might, for the purposes of competition, place her strongest scene first by starting the entry on page 50 (presenting it as page 1, of course). The synopsis would have to be revised, naturally, to make it appear that this is indeed the usual running order of the book, and our heroine would have to edit carefully, to make sure that there is nothing in the skipped-over pages that is vital to understanding what happens in the chapters presented in the entry. The job of the synopsis, then, in the hands of this tricky writer, would be to cover up the fact that the entry starts in the middle of the book. It would be just our little secret.

To put it in a less clever way: go ahead and submit your strongest chapter — but for heaven’s sake, do NOT label it as Chapter 8. Label it as Chapter 1, and write a new synopsis for a book where Chapter 8 IS Chapter 1. Just make sure that your synopsis is compelling and lucid enough that it all makes sense as a story.

As a general rule, anything you can do to place your best writing within the first few pages of your entry, you should do. Judges’ impressions tend to be formed very fast, and if you can wow ’em before page 3, you absolutely should.

Actually, just as with work you submit to agents, the first page of your entry is far and away the most important thing the judges see. Unless there is a strong reason to place your synopsis first, put it at the end of your entry, so your first page can jump out at the judges. And if you can include some very memorable incident or imagery within the first few paragraphs of your chapter, that much the better.

And whatever you do, try not to save writing your synopsis for a contest for the very last moments before you stuff the entry into an envelope. Synopsis-writing is hard; budget adequate time for it. And make absolutely sure that the synopsis you submit supports the image of the book you want your submitted chapter to send.

Tomorrow, I shall delve into the little niceties that make your entry look truly polished. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

As promised, I am continuing my three-week (give or take a day or two) holiday present to my readers, and continuing to yammer on about tips on how to improve your contest entries. Allow me to reiterate a point I made last week: a single book may benefit from having one version of the synopsis that goes out to agents, and another, more streamlined one that gets tucked into contest entries. The reason is simple: in each context, the synopsis is intended to perform different functions.

Let me back up for a moment and define synopsis, for those of you new to the term:

SYNOPSIS, n.: A brief exposition in the present tense of the plot of a novel or the argument of a book. Typically, synopses run from 2-5 pages (double-spaced), depending upon the requirements of the requesting agent or editor. (See my blogs of Sept. 9 and shortly thereafter for tips how to write a stellar synopsis for querying agents.)

If you are entering a category that covers book-length material, you will pretty much always be asked to submit a synopsis. In general, contests will specify the length of the synopses they would like to accompany your entry; sometimes, the rules merely set a maximum page limit for the entry, and allow the writer to decide how much of it to devote to the synopsis.

Even if the contest rules specify an absurdly short synopsis (or make it sound shorter by calling it a plot outline), DO NOT single-space it or fudge with the margins to make it fit within the specified limits, unless the contest rules say you may. Trust me, if the rest of your entry is in 12-point Times New Roman with 1-inch margins, double-spaced, almost any judge is going to be able to tell right away if your synopsis is presented differently.

NEVER allow a contest synopsis to run over 5 pages or under 2. Since 3-4 pages is industry standard, a synopsis that is much shorter will make you look as if you are unable to sustain a longer exposition; if it is much longer, you will look as though you aren’t aware of the standard.

Also, for fiction entries, avoid the temptation to turn the synopsis into either a back-jacket blurb (“My writing teacher says this is the best novel since THE SUN ALSO RISES!”) or an exposition on why you chose to write the book (“It isn’t autobiographical, but…) For nonfiction, you will want to do some gentle blurbing, to give an indication of why your book is uniquely marketable (see yesterday’s posting), but again, try not to get sidetracked on WHY you chose to write it. A LOT of contest synopses go off on these tangents, to the detriment of the entry.

Just so you know, in the eyes of the industry, there are only three contexts where a lengthy discussion of why you chose to write a book is appropriate. First, within a nonfiction book proposal, where it is a necessary component to making the argument that you are uniquely qualified to write the book you are proposing. Second, within the context of an interview AFTER the book is released. Interviewers LOVE hearing about writers’ motivations — which, I suspect is why aspiring writers so often want to tell everyone they see what is and is not autobiographical in their novels. So you can go to town after the book comes out. Third — and here is where talking about it will help you most — when you are chatting with other writers.

All too often, writers become frustrated at this crucial moment, and just throw together a query letter, a pitch, and a synopsis in a fatal rush, unsure of what they are doing, and dash their work off to agents.

The only exception to this is if you have some very specific expertise that renders your take on a subject particularly valid. If so, make sure that information is stated within the first paragraph of your NF synopsis; if you are writing a novel, and you feel that you have an inside perspective that simply must be mentioned to the judges, stick it at the end of the synopsis, where it won’t be too intrusive.

For a synopsis to accompany a fiction entry, your goal is very, very simple: make it a terrific story. All too often, writers just state the premise of the novel, rather than taking the reader through the plot, blow by blow. If the plot has twists and surprises, so should the synopsis. Show the story arc, and make it compelling enough that the judge will scrawl on the evaluation sheet, “Wow, I want to read this book when it comes out.”

The easiest way to get the judges involved is not merely to summarize the plot as quickly as possible, but to give the feel of a number of specific scenes. Don’t be afraid to use forceful imagery and strong sensual detail, and try to have the tone of the synopsis echo the tone of the book.

Yes, I know: it’s a tall order. But don’t forget that the synopsis is every bit as much an indication of your writing skill as the actual chapters that you are submitting.

For nonfiction, your goal is threefold: to show the argument of the book in some detail, along with some indication of how you intend to prove your case; to show that the book will appeal to a large enough market niche to make publishing it worthwhile, and to demonstrate that you are the best-qualified person in the universe to write the book. In 3-5 pages, no less.

For the first, it is helpful to have an outline of your proposed chapters in front of you, so you can use the synopsis to demonstrate how each chapter will build upon the next to make your overall case. Even if you are writing a self-help book, history book, or memoir, you are always making a case when you write nonfiction, if only to argue that your take on the world around you is interesting, unique, and valid. Be certain that by the time a judge finishes reading your synopsis, s/he will understand very clearly what this argument is — and what evidence you will be bringing in to demonstrate it. (Statistics? Extensive background research? Field experience? Interviews? A wealth of personal anecdotes? Etc.)

If you are pinched for space, you need only devote the first paragraph to marketing information. Say why the world needs your book. If you are writing on a subject that is already quite full of authorial opinion, make it plain why your book is different and better. (“Have you ever wondered what goes on underneath the snow while you are skiing on top of it? Although there are many books currently on the market for snowboarding enthusiasts, MOUNTAINS MY WAY is the first to be written by a geologist.”) If you have statistics on your prospective market, this is the place to mention them. (“There are currently 2 million Americans diagnosed with agoraphobia, yet there are few self-help books out there for them — and only one that is actually written by an agoraphobic, someone who truly understands what it feels like to be shut in.”)

The third desiratum is what is known in the industry as your platform, and admittedly, it is a trifle hard to explain why you are THE expert best qualified to write this book without saying something about yourself. Go ahead and state your qualifications — just don’t slip up and mention yourself by name. (“A well-respected Seattle area caterer for twenty years, the author has extensive experience in crafting meals for the pickiest of eaters.”) No one is going to disqualify you for mentioning that you have a Ph.D. or went to a specific culinary school. (“SHELLFISH AND YOU is the fruit of many years of postdoctoral research. The author, a graduate of the prestigious Scripps School of Oceanography, is recognized worldwide as an up-and-coming authority on mollusk behavior.”)

If your head is whirling from all of this, don’t worry. I’ll go into some tips on how to simplify the synopsis process tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

I thought about it over the weekend, and yes, Virginia, I DO have enough left to say on the subject of contests to carry us all the way through Greek Christmas, January 6. Which, as it happens, is the extended deadline for the Holiday Tables contest, sponsored by yours truly. (Entry details in the blog of December 8.) The winner will receive undying glory and the opportunity to post writing both here and on a well-respected literary fiction website. That’s two legitimate publication credits and a boastable contest win, my friends.

You can’t win if you don’t enter.

Having won the PNWA’s Zola Award in the nonfiction book/memoir category last year, I feel that I should add a few category-specific hints for my own kind today. (And have I mentioned recently that THE VERY MEMOIR THAT WON is currently available for presale on Amazon? It’s called A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK now, although when it won, it was titled IS THAT YOU, PUMPKIN? Unfortunately, it will not actually be available to READ the first chapter, which the nonfiction book/memoir judges liked so much, before the upcoming PNWA contest deadline, but hey, think of all the good contest karma you’ll be racking up by checking out the Amazon blurb.)

I have judged in this category before in several contests, and please, I implore you, if you are submitting a memoir entry, FOLLOW THE RULE ABOUT NOT HAVING YOUR OWN NAME APPEAR ANYWHERE IN THE MANUSCRIPT. Yes, I know, it’s very difficult not to refer to yourself by name in the story of your own life, but seriously, I’ve seen entries get disqualified for this.

And for good reason. For a contest to be worth its salt, it must be able to claim that its judging procedures are not biased; the first step to assuring lack of personal bias is to institute blind judging, where no judge knows the name of any given author. Now, as I explained in my first blogs on contests, some competitions are only apparently unbiased, but for the most part, contest organizers take authorial anonymity very seriously indeed.

I went to college with Danny, a very clever, very ambitious writer who periodically contributed pieces to the on-campus humor magazine. Now, it was the practice of the magazine to publish most of its pieces without bylines, to encourage collaboration amongst members of the writing club. But as I said, Danny was ambitious: he, like many of the other writers in the club, was anxious to graduate with clippings he could use to promote his work later on. So Danny did something exceptionally crafty: he inserted his own name into every ostensibly anonymous piece he wrote, much as Jerry Lee Lewis used to refer to himself in his own lyrics, so radio listeners would know who sang the song. Danny’s favorite way of doing this was to have an imaginary conversation with himself, so an alter ego could address him by name.

Danny did in fact land a pretty good writing job after graduation, I am told, but he was relying upon his club’s editorial indulgence to let him get away with breaking the rules. In a contest, this practice would have gotten him disqualified immediately.

Because there are legions of rule-breakers out there, you need to be ultra-careful about not doing inadvertently what Danny did on purpose. Unfortunately, within the first-person narrative common to memoirs, narrators tend to talk to themselves all the time,  à la Hamlet: Danny, you get ahold of yourself, now.

Keep a sharp eye out for that in preparing your contest entries.

Usually, though, the author’s name comes up as an inadvertent slip, where it’s pretty obvious that the author thought she had expunged all relevant references to herself. Even these innocent mistakes can knock your entry out of competition.

Let’s say the author is named Tammy Postlethwaite. Here are the most frequent ways that her name is likely to appear in a memoir. Check for these:

When another character directly addresses the narrator: “Tammy, have you seen the rice pudding?”

When another character is talking about the narrator behind her back: “Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver. He’s paying too much attention to that Tammy next door.”

And, in the VAST MAJORITY of childhood memoirs, when the narrator gets in trouble, some adult says: “Tammy Marie Postlethwaite, you come in this house this instant!”

Remember, in order to violate the rule, even if a character OTHER than the author appears with the author’s last name, it can cost you:

When a family member is addressed by a third party: “Mrs. Postlethwaite, your daughter is under arrest.”

When the narrator refers to her family collectively, or to a possession as theirs: In the Postlethwaite residence, Christmas decorations abounded.

Remember, too, that self-references to EITHER your first or last name, not just to both together, count as rule violations. By all means, do a search-and-replace for BOTH your first AND last names in your entry before you print it up.

Why might this be necessary, you ask, since in most contests, the judges never see your name attached to the manuscript, and thus would not know that the Tammy mentioned is the author? Well, two reasons. First, such is the seriousness with which blindness is taken that if a judge even SUSPECTS that an entry contains the author’s name, the entry may be toast. Second, it is not unheard-of for contests to have initial screeners, whose SOLE function is to check the entries for rule violations before the non-rule breaking entries are passed along. These screeners sometimes do have your entire entry packet — and thus your name.

The easiest way to avoid this problem is to use a pseudonym, of course, within the context of the entry. However, it is well worth your while to add a note to the title page of your entry, STATING that you have changed the names, because, as I mentioned above, the mere suspicion of rule-breaking can harm your chances of winning. How is the judge to know whether you have substituted the names or not, if you do not say so? “For the purposes of this entry,” you could write, “I have changed my family name to Parrothead.”

Yes, it’s kind of silly, but that way, you make it pellucidly clear that you’re not referring to yourself.

Other good tip for memoirists entering their work in contests is to do a bit of market research. (Actually, this is a good idea for anyone writing a book, and everyone who has to write a synopsis for a contest.) Is your memoir in fact unique, or does it fit into a well-defined market niche?

It is a question well worth asking before entering a memoir into a contest. All of us tend to think of our own experiences as unique, which of course they are. Every point of view is to a very great extent original. However, certain life experiences tend to recur, and tender, well-written memoirs about a Baby Boomer daughter nursing her mother through her final illness, for instance, or a former drug addict/alcoholic/workaholic rediscovering the beauty of day-to-day life, or a former hippie/swinger/disco queen recounting his or her glory days are not altogether uncommon. Nor are spiritual awakenings, discoveries that institutions are corrupt, or personal battles against major illnesses. If you check a well-stocked bookstore, or even run your subject matter through an Amazon search, you will get a pretty firm idea of how many other accounts there are that resemble your own, at least superficially.

This is not to say that your personal take is not worth telling — if you’re a good writer with a truly individual take on the world around you, it undoubtedly is. Remember, though, that judges tend to be reading for marketability, and if they perceive that you are writing in an already glutted submarket, your entry may not do as well as an entry on a less well-trodden topic.

Unfortunately, if you are writing about a common experience, you cannot get away with assuming that the writing alone will differentiate it from the other submissions. If there’s recently been a bestseller along similar lines as your topic, you can bet your boots that yours will not be the only entry that resembles it. Think about how many people suddenly started writing accounts of growing up poor immediately after ANGELA’S ASHES hit the big time, or about over-medicated, over-sexed teenagerhoods in the wake of PROZAC NATION.

If you are writing on a common topic, the bar automatically goes higher, alas, for making YOUR story stand out amongst the rest. If there are a whole lot of entries with similar stories, it is just human nature for the judges to get a trifle bored after the second or third one. You really have to knock their socks off, to an extent that you might not if your topic were not popular that year.

The best way to make your work stand out from the crowd is to use the synopsis to show how YOUR memoir is QUITE different than the other memoirs on the subject — and knowing the existing memoir market will be most helpful in figuring out what aspects to stress. What made your experience special, unique, unforgettable from the point of view of a third party? Why couldn’t anyone else on earth have written it, and why will readers want to buy it?

No need to turn your synopsis into a back jacket blurb (of which, more over the next few postings), but do show how your work is UNLIKE anything else the judge is going to read. Yes, each judge will have your chapter, or few pages, or however much the contest allows you to show him, but sometimes, the difference between a “Thank you for entering” letter and one that says, “Congratulations — you’re a finalist!” is a synopsis that makes the case that THIS entry, out of the half-dozen entries on the same general topic, is the one that is going to hit the big time.

But to discuss that, I shall have to get into the issue of how contest synopses differ from query synopses, and that is a project for another day. Tomorrow, to be precise, and perhaps the day after that.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Okay, I wrote through last-minute shopping days; I wrote through Christmas, and I’ve been writing through Hanukkah, and we’re right on top of New Year’s Eve, so it’s time to wrap up my holiday present to my readers, a lengthy series on how to improve your chances of winning or placing in a literary contest. Time to tie up the loose ends and offer those last few droplets of wisdom.

(Unless, of course, I happen to think of more good contest-related advice in the weeks between now and the end of February, when entries are due in the PNWA contest, or next week, when entries are due for the Holiday Tables contest. If I come up with anything juicy, I shall pass it along toute de suite. Or maybe I’ll decide over the weekend that I have so much more to say that I’ll keep writing through Epiphany.)

You will notice, in reading back over my advice on steering clear of crooked contests and avoiding technical mistakes likely to knock your entry out of consideration, I have spoken very little on the subject of content — other than to recommend not offending the judges. Frankly, I don’t think an honest literary contest has any business dictating content, but a surprising number of them do, either overtly (in defining the categories) or covertly (in defining winning criteria for the judges). This is yet another reason to read contest rules VERY carefully: skim a little too quickly, and you may not catch that contest organizers have limited what kinds of short story they want.

This is particularly true in short-short story competitions. It’s not uncommon for those to specify the topic outright. Read with care before you submit.

Few writers in the heftier categories (e.g., ones that accept book excerpts) write new entirely new pieces for every contest they enter, with good reason. If you are trying to fit prewritten work into specified categories, make sure to read the category’s definition FIRST, before you enter. This is not a time merely to skim the titles of the categories: get into the details of the description. Read it several times. Have a writer friend read it, then read your entry, to double-check that your work is in fact appropriate to the category as the rules have defined it.

I would LOVE to report that entries never come in labeled for the wrong category, but, alas, sometimes they do. And most contests have far too many entries for the initial screeners to recategorize the work for the careless entrant. Be careful.

Also, consider the possibility that the category you had envisioned for your work — in other words, where you had envisioned its being shelved in a bookstore or library — may not be the best category in any given contest for you. Would the first chapter of your memoir work best in the nonfiction book category or the nonfiction short piece category? Is your novel really mainstream, or is it actually romance? If the contest offers a novel-in-progress category, would your barely-finished book do better there, or against the fully polished novels?

And so forth. The goal here is to gain a win to put on your writing resume and in your query letters, not to force your work into the category you have preselected for it. Yes, there is usually more prestige attached to book-length categories, but, frankly, in major contests, that’s where the competition tends to be the most fierce. If a shorter-length category seems to offer you a better conceptual fit or better odds, it’s sometimes worth switching.

Be flexible. One of the best memoirs I have ever read, Barbara Robinette Moss’ astonishing CHANGE ME INTO ZEUS’ DAUGHTER (if you’ve never read it, and you have even the vaguest interest in the art of autobiography, you simply cannot fully appreciate the art form until you have read this book. It’s gorgeous and painful and brilliant in a way few books manage to be.), found its publisher because its downright lyrical first chapter won in the personal essay category in the Faulkner competition. That was smart contest selection — and a well-deserved win.

This is not to say that you should rush out and enter exactly the same piece in, say, both the mainstream novel and novel-in-progress categories of the same competition, or in both the genre novel and mystery short story categories. Most contests will not allow you to enter the same work in multiple categories, but some will, so check the contest rules carefully before you spend the extra entrance fee.

Truth does compel me to say, however, that it is not unheard of for authors to get away with this sort of double-dipping even when it’s forbidden, as often the bureaucratic part of accepting an entry entails merely noting the author’s name and title, assigning numbers so the judges don’t know who wrote what, sending the entry to the appropriate category chair, and cashing the check. So when an unscrupulous author, say, is bright enough to give different titles to remarkably similar entries and perhaps mail them in separate envelopes, it is highly unlikely that anyone in the front office will have the opportunity to notice that the two distinct entries are, in fact, the same work.

I would have to scold you if you did that, of course. Or if you were clever enough to revise the work just enough between entries that, say, there weren’t more than 50 consecutive words in a row that were identical. That’s maybe one word per paragraph. Ooh, I would have to wag my finger over you if you went that route. Really, I would. That would be just a shade too professional to be merely clever.

Oh, wait — I’ve just realized that I’ve forgotten to deal with an AMAZINGLY important part of any book category’s entry: the synopsis. Oh, and while a good synopsis for a query is usually a good synopsis for a contest entry, it is not necessarily always the case. And there are ways in which a GREAT contest synopsis can differ significantly from a great query synopsis…

Well, that does it. I’ll just have to come back to more contest advice next week. Come to think of it, I have enough to say to carry us through to Greek Christmas, January 6, which as you know is the deadline for entering this blog’s Holiday Tables contest (check out post of December 9 for details.)

Happy New Year, and keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, campers —

All done digesting yesterday’s bitter pill about the realities of contest competition? Or are you still fighting the notion that something very, very tiny might have knocked your last contest entry out of finalist consideration? (Or have you not been following the last week and a half of blogs, my holiday present to my readers, on how to improve one’s odds in the contest game, and thus haven’t the vaguest notion what I’m going on about?) Well, keep those digestive juices flowing, because what I’m going to tell you today will cause you chagrin for about a month — and then save you massive amounts of writing grief for the rest of your natural life.

As I mentioned last week, contests that give entrants written feedback, regardless of where their entries place, can be a real boon for the aspiring writer. Sometimes, they give great advice — and actually, the cost of the average entry fee is not much more than a professional editor would charge to give feedback on the average-length entry. So if you get a conscientious editor, you can glean a great deal of practical advice.

If you get a grumpy judge, however, or one who disqualifies your entry on technical grounds, getting feedback can be a real ego-saver. If the judge missed the point of your piece (it’s been known to happen, alas; remember, until the final round of judging, the vast majority of readers are volunteers, and as such, their reading skills vary), it will be very, very apparent from his feedback. And if you got a judge who simply did not like the typeface you used (again, it has been known to happen), it is far more useful to you to learn for certain that the typeface — and not, say, the quality of your writing — scuttled your chances.

Okay, everyone, take a deep breath. Yes, I did just say that I have seen good writing disqualified for reasons as minor as typeface selection — and in contests where the entry requirements did not specify the use of a particular font. I have seen good writing tossed aside for reasons as arbitrary as the first-round judge not liking semicolons much. Basically, your entry needs to speak to readers with the broadest possible array of prejudices about what is and is not good writing. Effectively, your work is not just being read by the judges, but by the spectre of every writing teacher they have ever had.

What I’m trying to tell you here is that when you submit your work to be judged in a contest, you are expected to adhere to not only the contest requirements (see yesterday’s blog for guidance on that all-important insight) but also to the contest judges’ conception of how a professional manuscript should be presented. As a result, it is VERY much in your interest to make your entry look as close to a submission to a top-flight agent as the contest rules permit.

You should make sure, in short, that your work is in standard format.

I can hear my long-time readers groan: yes, I am harping on standard format AGAIN, and with good reason. As I mentioned last week, it adds significantly to the prestige of a contest if its winners go on to have their work published; to obtain this wholly delightful result, contest judges tend to screen entries not just for quality, but for marketability as well. So if your entry contains the type of non-standard formatting that the judge believes would cause the average agent or small-press editor to cast it aside, it’s not going to make it to the next round. (Particularly in those contests where final-round judging is performed by agents, editors, and/or celebrity writers; the screeners want a very clean set of manuscripts to send to them.)

Trust me on this one: the exact same entry, if you entered it once in standard formatting and once in more eccentric format, would almost invariably place at different levels in any writing competition held in North America. I have judged contests where formatting counted for as much as a quarter of the final score. If you are serious about making it to the finalist round, use standard format.

You can save yourself SIGNIFICANT bundles of time during contest entry season if you just go ahead and adhere to standard format from the first day you start working on a project, of course. Sending out queries will be swifter, and you will definitely be in better shape on that great day when an agent or editor asks to read your first 50 pages. Think of it as having your interview suit all pressed and ready, so you can leap into it the second you get the call from your dream job.

Here are the rules of standard format, tarted up a bit for contest use:

1) All manuscripts must be typed and double-spaced, with at least one-inch margins on all sides of the page.

No exceptions, unless the contest rules SPECIFICALLY ask you to do otherwise.

2) All manuscripts are printed on ONE side of the page.

Again, unless you are asked to do otherwise — and yes, this is wasteful of paper. Deal with it.

3) The text should be left justified ONLY.

A lot of writers squirm about this one. They want to believe that a professional manuscript looks exactly like a printed book, but the fact is, it shouldn’t. Yes, books feature text that runs in straight vertical lines along the margins, and yes, your word processing program will replicate that, if you ask it nicely. But don’t: the straight margin should be the left one.

4) The typeface should be 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier.

Yes, these are plain, not-too-pretty fonts, but they are in fact the standards of the publishing industry. If you want a specific font for your finished book, you should NOT use it in the manuscript, even if you found a very cool way to make your Elvin characters’ dialogue show up in Runic. That is a matter of discussion between you and your future editor. For the purposes of contest entries and queries, stick to looking like a professional.

If you write screenplays, you may only use Courier. Seriously, most screenplay agents will not read even the first page of a script in another typeface — which means that most contest judges will follow suit.

5) No matter how cool your desired typeface looks, or how great the title page looks with 14-point type, keep the ENTIRE manuscript in the same font and typeface.

Industry standard is 12-point. Again, no exceptions. You may place your title in boldface, if you like, but that’s it.

6) Words in foreign languages should be italicized.

Including Elvish. You don’t want your judge to think you’ve made a typo, do you?

7) EVERY page in the manuscript should be numbered.

This one is generally an automatic disqualification offense.

Each page should a standard slug line in the header, listing ABBREVIATED TITLE/PAGE #. The safest place for this is left-justified, but you can get away with right-justifying it as well.

Yes, I know: this seems a trifle silly to do in a contest that threatens to disqualify you (as blind contests do) if you mention yourself by name. However, I have seen complaints about lack of a slug line so often in judges’ circles that I am going ahead and recommending its use.

However, this is one instance where contest standard is different from standard format. Standard format dictates a slug line that runs thus: AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/ABBREVIATED TITLE/PAGE #. So the third page of my memoir manuscript reads: MINI/A FAMILY DARKLY/3.

In contest format, however, the slug line would look like this: A FAMILY DARKLY/3

9) The first page of a chapter should begin a third of the way down the page.

That’s twelve lines, incidentally. The chapter name (or merely “Chapter One”) may appear on the first line of the first page, but then nothing should appear until a third of the way down the page.

10) The beginning of each paragraph should be indented five spaces.

Yes, I know that published books — particularly mysteries, I notice — often begin chapters and sections without indentation. Trust me, that was the editor’s choice, not the author’s, and copying the style will surely get your work knocked out of serious prize consideration.

11) Don’t skip an extra line between paragraphs.

This one is for all of you bloggers out there. The whole darned manuscript should be double-spaced. The only exception is that you may skip an extra line to indicate a section break.

12) All numbers under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25.

13) Dashes should be doubled — hyphens are single, as in self-congratulatory.

Yes, I know that your word processing program will automatically change a doubled dash to a single one. Change it back, because you never know when a real stickler for format is going to end up as your contest judge.

14) Dashes should have spaces at each end — rather than—like this.

Again, I know: books no longer preserve these spaces, for reasons of printing economy. But standard format is invariable upon this point. It’s a pain, true, but is it really worth annoying a judge over?

15) The use of ANY brand name should be accompanied by the trademark symbol, as in Kleenex™.

If you catch a judge under the age of 30, you may get away without including the trademark symbol, but legally, you are not allowed to use a trademarked name without it. Writers — yes, and publishing houses, too — have actually been sued over this.

There you have it. If you adhere to these standards in your contest entries (except, of course, where the contest rules specify otherwise), your work will sail past that scourge of entries everywhere, the hyper-nit-picky judge. A manuscript in standard format looks to the critical eye like a couple dressed in formal wear for a black-tie event: yes, it is possible that the hosts will be too nice to toss them out if they show up in a run-of-the-mill casual suits or jeans, but the properly-attired couple will be admitted happily. By dressing as the hosts wished, the couple is showing respect to the event and the people who asked them to attend.

Dress your work appropriately, and it will be a welcome guest in the finalist ring.

Tomorrow, I shall move on to more subtle ways to woo contest judges. In the meantime, keep up the good work, and avoid that nasty cold that’s going around!

– Anne Mini

Hello, all —

I took yesterday off, because — as my bank manager kept assuring me in harried tones — it WAS a legal holiday. Don’t blame the banks for not being open; blame Congress. But now I am back, raring to go on my ongoing holiday present to my readers, an exploration of ways in which you can increase your chances of winning literary contests.

Last week, I went over questions you should ask yourself before you enter a contest. Entering every contest for which your work is remotely qualified is surprisingly common, and can cost the unwary entrant hundreds of dollars per year in entry fees alone, not to mention the significant expenditure of time, postage, and anxiety. It adds up. So paring back to only those contests that are most likely to serve you is definitely a smart move.

Once you’ve picked your contest, it all comes down to the writing, right? The best writing invariably wins, doesn’t it?

Well, not always. As both a veteran contest-enterer (and winner) and an experienced contest judge, I am here to tell you, an AWFULLY high percentage of entries rush to disqualify themselves within the first couple of pages — and I’m going to tell you how.

Self-disqualifying entries tend actually to be welcomed by contest organizers, because they take up so much less time and effort to evaluate, resulting in a smaller contestant pool. In other words, the first screeners in almost any contest are LOOKING for reasons to disqualify your entry.

Don’t give them the chance.

If you are going to enter contests, the first premise you need to accept is that it is an inherently nit-picky business — and it’s your job to make sure you have followed every nit-picky rule set out by the contest requirements. Impeccably.

Obviously, it would be generous-hearted of contest organizers and judges everywhere to gloss over, say, the odd typo or the entrant who feels it artistically necessary to print some portion of the entry manuscript single-spaced, if the quality of writing is high. But think about it: if you have been handed fifty entries to read in your spare time (screeners and first-round judges are almost invariably volunteers), and you could toss aside twenty-eight of them after a page or two, wouldn’t you start disqualifying entries on technical grounds?

I’ll take your murmured “yes” as given.

What does this mean, from the entrant’s point of view? That this is not a forum where good-enough is going to fly. Even the best conceivable writing is not going to stand a chance if it is not technically perfect. The competition is not amongst all entries, but amongst those who have first passed the technical bar.

Within the context of a contest, technical perfection is measured by two things: adherence to what the individual judge reading your entry believes to be standard industry format for the genre (which I shall discuss tomorrow) and WHAT THE CONTEST RULES HAVE ASKED ENTRANTS TO DO. Of the two, the latter is far and away the most important.

Pay attention now, because I’m only going to say this once: THE SINGLE BEST THING YOU CAN DO TO IMPROVE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING OR PLACING IN A CONTEST IS TO FOLLOW THE STATED RULES TO THE LETTER. Even the ones that seem arbitrary, or even stupid, because (as I mentioned last week), the more senseless the requirement, the more likely it is to be used to disqualify entries.

This is just common sense, if you’re trying to maximize disqualifications: almost every writer who has ever taken a writing class or read a writers’ publication knows work should be double-spaced, for instance, but no one spontaneously places his first chapter and a synopsis in a bright blue folder, having first made the left-hand margin 1.5 inches to accommodate the brad, and makes sure that the name of the work, page number, and name of the contest is in the upper right margin in 10-point type. (A real set of contest requirements, incidentally.) Such an array of demands is brilliant, from a weeding-out point of view: the first-round judges don’t even have to open a folder that is, say, purple or navy, nor do they have to take the time to read entries with 1-inch left margins.

Is that rumbling noise I’m hearing out there the sound of everyone who has ever entered a contest with such requirements leaping to his feet and crying, “Wait — you mean they might not have READ my entry? After they cashed my $50 check?”

It is very, very possible, alas.

Now, most contests have far less restrictive requirements, but most of the time, even the most liberal contest judge will be REQUIRED to reduce the rating of an entry that violates even one of the basic rules as stated in the entry requirements. In other words, it can be the difference between making the finals and not. The most common rule violations:

Neglecting to add a slug line (the title of the work and page number, located in the top left-hand corner) on EVERY page;

Shrinking the typeface so that the submission fits within the stated page limits (oh, come on — you didn’t think they’d notice that your submission was shrunk to 91%, when it is surrounded by submissions printed in 12-point type?);

Not numbering the pages (VERY common);

Non-standard margins.

If you have ever committed any of these sins, you can raise your chances of making it to the finalist round exponentially through one simple act: never make any of these mistakes again.

You would be astonished — at least, I hope you would be — at just how few of the entrants in any given contest seem to have READ the formatting requirements. Often, these rules are buried at the end of the entry materials, but by all means, dig them out. Follow them as if your life depended upon it. And if you find yourself too sorely tempted to skip any specific requirement listed — such as, say, the information that must appear on the title page, another often-fudged requirement — save yourself some time and money, and just don’t enter the contest. Use the money to take a writing class, or to enter another contest, because if you don’t follow the rules, your chance of winning plummets to practically zero.

Again — it’s not the judges’ fault that entries get ruled out on technicalities; in most contests, the judges are not given any wiggle room. I remember only too well reading a truly well-written entry in a contest where I was a first-round judge (no, I can’t tell you which contest). It was an interesting story told from two POVs, and personally, I would have liked it to advance to the finals. However, it had one big technical problem: the contest rules had specified a single typeface throughout, and the author of this entry had chosen to use different typefaces for each of the POVs. So, unfortunately, I had to recommend that it be disqualified.

I felt terrible for a week, but what could I do? It would have been knocked out unread at the next level, anyway, and if I had pushed for an exception, it would have damaged the chances of the other excellent entries that I was able to send to the next round.

Not all judges or screeners are so tender-hearted, of course: many report becoming downright angry after reading the fourth or fifth entry that doesn’t follow the rules. Believe me, when you are relying upon the personal preferences of a judge, the last thing you want to do is annoy her.

Trust me, if you follow the rules to the letter, yours will be in the minority of entries. The bigger the contest, the more it will shine. Be memorable for good reasons, not for bad ones.

Just how common is it to ignore the rules? Well, back in my graduate school days, I used to teach discussion sections in gargantuan undergraduate lecture classes. After each test, the teaching assistants (for such we were called) would get together and set out grading criteria. What did each student need to say in order to answer each question at an A level? A B level? And so forth. We’d get together again after grading to compare how our students did. Invariably, the graders’ most oft-repeated complaint: what we came to call RTFQ!

It stands for Read The Question! (The additional F was an unspoken bow to the graders’ annoyance the thirtieth time they saw the same mistake.) There is something about a timed test that apparently makes students skip the vital step of reading the exam question carefully, to figure out what precisely they are being asked. Oh, they skim it — but in the skimming, they usually miss some crucial element of the question. Their grades go down accordingly.

In my experience, the mere necessity of meeting a contest entry deadline tends to have the same effect upon entrants. They skim the rules, or ignore them altogether. And it is disastrous for them.

So please, for my sake, sit down well before the contest deadline and make a checklist of the contest’s requirements. Check it twice, just like Santa does, for accuracy. As you complete the requirements and stuff the constituent parts of the entry into the envelope, check them off. Then, before you seal the envelope, pull the whole entry out again and read it over to make absolutely certain that you have met every tiny, nit-picky technical requirement. Then you can seal the envelope and rush it to the post office to get it postmarked by the deadline.

You can’t be first across the finish line if you are disqualified in the first lap, my friends. Be extremely careful, and your chances of contest victory will rise.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

I’m going to be a trifle terse today, campers — even as I write this, I am supposed to be constructing a croquembouche for a Christmas Eve shindig. A croquembouche is often used as a wedding cake by the French: it’s a pyramid of cream puffs filled with liqueur-laced whipped cream, drizzled with caramel syrup, and stacked into the shape of, well, as Christmas tree. Except I think I’m going to make mine in the shape of a pagoda. It is not, in short, an endeavor to be entered into lightly, and I need to get cracking.

But first, I want to pass along another installment of my holiday present to you fine people, a series on how to make the most of literary contests. Next week, I shall be going into fine detail about technical tweaking you can give your entries that will make them more likely to end up in the finalist pile, but today, I want to finish up my series of questions you should ask yourself about a contest before you invest your time, money, and hope in entering.

This one is a corollary to the questions I have been asking all week: how much of your writing time is being eaten up by contests these days? If you have been entering quite a few (and the late fall is a very common deadline choice for contests and fellowship applications), would your time be better spent by passing on the next one?

I once met a writer at an artists’ colony (we’d both won a competition to get in, one with a VERY involved application) who spent literally three weeks of our four-week retreat there applying for other retreats, filling out grant applications, and entering contests. When the time came at the end of our sojourn to share what we’d written during our stay, she ended up reading a piece she had written several years before. In her frantic quest to fund her writing habit, she had turned herself into a non-stop entering machine with no time or energy to write anything new.

There are so many literary contests that if you entered them all, you would never have a chance to get down to serious writing. Equally seriously, if you have a finished piece that you should be marketing to agents and/or small presses, it is very easy to tell yourself that entering contest after contest — at the expense of devoting that time to sending out queries — is a time saver, in the long run. Unfortunately, that often isn’t true.

Yes, a win (or place, or finalist status) in a reputable contest can indeed speed up your agent-seeking process exponentially. I would be the last to deny that, as I met my agent as a direct result of winning the Nonfiction Book/Memoir category in the PNWA contest in 2004. It CAN lead to the fast track, and you should definitely enter a few for that reason.

However — and this is a serious consideration — a LOT of aspiring writers turn to the contest route as a SUBSTITUTE for querying, and that can definitely slow the road to publication to a crawl. It’s understandable, of course — sending out query after query is discouraging, and if you do it one at a time, it can take years to pique a good agent’s interest. (This is the main reason that I advise my clients NOT to send only one query out at a time. If you keep good records, you can easily have ten out at the same time. Contrary to writers’ conference myth, agencies do NOT insist upon single submissions; in those rare instances when they do, they list this preference in the standard guides to agents. Sending one, waiting weeks for a reply, then sending the next only after all hope is gone on the first, merely squanders your precious time.)

However tired of the querying grind you may be, please do not use contests as a complete substitute. For one thing, the turn-around time for contest entries is significantly longer than the response time for even the least organized agencies: four to six months is common, and if you have a finished novel or NF book proposal in hand, that’s too long to wait.

Also, if you hang all of your hopes on a contest win, even if you enter a plethora of contests, you are relying upon the quirky tastes of people you have never met to determine your fate. Oh, yes, I know — that’s true when you send a query to an agent as well, but as I shall demonstrate next week, there are a great many reasons a submission might get knocked out of a contest competition that have little to do with the actual marketability — and sometimes not even the writing quality — of your work. To make it to the finalist round in a contest, you have to avoid every conceivable pet peeve that the initial screeners might have.

With first readers at agencies (who are seldom the agents themselves), you can at least rely upon certain basic rules. Standard format, for instance, is not a matter of individual whim, and you’re not going to have your submission tossed out on technical grounds if you follow it. But in a contest, if you hit a volunteer first reader whose college English professor insisted that semicolons are always a bad idea, your work is likely to be knocked out of consideration the first time you use one. You never can tell who is going to be a contest judge, so the outcome even for very good writing is far from predictable.

So please, keep sending out those queries while you enter contests — and if you find that the time to prep contest entries are starting to be your excuse for not sending out more queries, stop and reevaluate whether you are making the best use of your time in your pursuit of publication.

Off to bake cream puffs now. Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

P.S.: Don’t forget to take notes over the next week to inspire your entry to the Holiday Tables Contest! The deadline has been extended to January 6, so keep those entries rolling in! While the prize of posting your work here, posting it on a highly respected literary fiction website, AND being able to boast that you won the contest may not seem as sexy as a contest that offers more tangible prizes, it’s a lot of bang for your entry time: two legitimate publication credits and a contest win. Check out my post of December 9 for contest details.

As my ongoing holiday present to my readers, I have been writing for the last couple of posts about entering literary contests, and how to maximize your entry fee dollar. There are a million good reasons to enter contests in general — the writing resume candy, the query letter boasting rights, and the opportunities to promote yourself to conference-attending agents, to name but a few — but not all contests are created equal. Some will help you more than others, so it is very much to your advantage to choose your contests wisely.

This is particularly true for novelists and nonfiction writers who enter contests. True, the adulation tends to be greater for winners of categories rewarding entire books, but the fact is, the vast majority of contests ask for short pieces, for the simple reason that it requires much, much less effort on the sponsoring organization’s part to process them. Short story writers, essayists, and even poets enjoy a VASTLY greater scope of contest opportunity (which, in turn, makes these contest wins a trifle less valuable in the eyes of agents and editors, but still worthwhile) than those of us who write entire books. If you write in any of these shorter formats, you have only to open any issue of POETS & WRITERS to find dozens of contests just crying out for your work — contests that often include publication as part of the prize.

Book-length writers have many fewer contest forums at their disposal, and those that exist tend not to ask that the whole book be submitted, but only the first chapter and a synopsis, at most. Writers whose ideas expand beyond 25-page limits can feel discouraged by this, or even discriminated against, and with reason.

Writers of book-length pieces also enjoy the considerable advantage of being paid astronomically more for their work when it sells — you’d have to place a tremendous number of poems in paying venues to make ends — so don’t feel too sorry for them. But the fact that the contest universe is hugely biased toward producers of shorter pieces makes it significantly harder for novelists and such to chalk up a contest win.

If you write in the longer formats, yet are comfortable in the shorter, you might want to consider polishing a single short story, poem, or essay to a high luster and sending it on the contest circuit, to try to rake in a win you can add to your credentials list. No one is going to hold it against you that the credential you used to catch an agent’s attention was for a gorgeously terse poem, while the book you were pitching was a three-volume work of science fiction.

However, if shorter work is not your cup of tea, don’t force yourself. Personally, I feel that the short story and the novel are quite different art forms, as different as painting in oils and sketching in charcoal — witness the number of writers who publish several short stories in venues like THE NEW YORKER, and publish them in collections, only to find after they have signed a novel contract that they don’t have a novel in them. Short pieces are about the surprise of instant revelation; novels (and book-length memoirs, and nonfiction books) are about character and argument development. Mastering the skills of one does not necessarily prep an author to produce the other.

I know a lot of writers disagree with me on this subject — including, I should mention, virtually everyone who has ever taught in an M.F.A. program — so you should feel free to try your hand in more than one format. But do make sure that anything you enter in a contest is your best writing, of course.

If you are the kind of writer who sticks single-mindedly to a long project until it is finished, however, it is a good idea to look upon contests not merely as rolls of the dice to try to win the jackpot of recognition (and, the fantasy goes, an agent and major book deal immediately thereafter), but as tools to learn how to improve your work. Because — and I’m letting you in on a literary judge secret here — most of the time, contest judges are not so much judging the quality of the writing in an entry as assessing its marketability. A great idea with huge market potential, presented in a clear and professional manner, will often edge out a beautifully-written piece aimed at a tiny market niche.

This is not true of every contest that accepts book-length work (or portions thereof), naturally but it’s true more often than not. It’s not unusual for the final judges of contests to be the exact same agents and editors who appear at conferences — and if there is anything that THEY’re looking for, it’s marketability. Great writing is always a plus, but to win a contest, it isn’t always enough.

Knowing this can save you a lot of grief at contest time. If your work is not particularly mainstream, select contests that cater to your niche, rather than hoping your work will fly in a more general contest. If you want to make your work appeal to the largest segment of the reading population as possible, select contests where the judges give feedback on entries — it’s some of the least sentimental, least punch-pulling marketing advice you will ever receive. If you approach it in that spirit, you can learn a great deal — especially if you are new to querying and aren’t sure why your work keeps getting rejected.

Which brings me, at long last (phew!), to the fourth on my list of questions to ask yourself before entering a contest: does it have advantages for non-winning entrants?

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but almost no one wins the first contest he enters. Contest entrants experience a fairly sharp learning curve, for reasons I shall be covering later in this series; there are many, many simple mistakes that frequently disqualify inexperienced entrants outright, even with otherwise well-written entries. Even if your entry is a monument of precision and contest-rule adhesion, you may have to enter a few times to learn the rhythms and preferences of a contest before you win.

So it is very much in your interests to make your first contest entries ones that will help you even if you don’t win. For instance, if you are new to the game, it is a better use of your contest-entering buck to go for contests that recognize semi-finalists, as well as finalists. That way, you maximize your probability of garnering boasting rights from those entries.

Contests that offer significant feedback to contest entrants are very, very useful when you are first starting out, as you may use them to learn how to polish up future entries. PNWA contest judges, for instance, have to fill out a questionnaire about every entry they read, explaining precisely how they thought the entry did or did not meet the contest criteria. The entrants receive these forms after the competition is ended, so they may study them for hints on how to improve their entries.

In other words, my friends, there is a whole range of benefits that can accrue from contest entry beyond winning the grand prize. By selecting the contests that meet your current needs, rather than entering blindly or with an all-or-nothing attitude, you can maximize the good entering will do you. And, of course, you might win!

Tomorrow, I shall shift gears a little to talk about the widely differing time commitments necessary to meet contest criteria. Some allow you just to pop your work in the mail; some require you to fill out extensive forms; some specify such stringent formatting requirements that you cannot use the work submitted to them for any other purpose. Tomorrow, I shall give you some tips on navigating the waters of these requirements.

Happy holiday madness, everybody; I have just discovered that the sterling soul who cuts my hair has never read any David Sedaris, and naturally, I cannot allow that situation to continue. Not while there’s still a holiday-packed bookstore open.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Today, I am continuing with my holiday present to my readers, an ongoing discussion on how to improve your chances of winning literary contests. I had anticipated only a week’s worth of posts on the subject (ho, ho, ho), but having chatted with several major contest winners since I posted my last, I suspect I might have gleaned enough wisdom on the subject to take us to New Year’s Eve. If the information can assist you, I want to post it here.

I had written yesterday about how to determine whether to enter any specific contest or not. I suggested that you start asking yourself a few questions before you invest time and money in entry fees. Entry fees can be quite hefty, especially cumulatively; if you enter many, have a chat with your tax advisor about establishing your writing as a small business. Contest entry is legitimate promotion for your work. (Contrary to popular belief, you don’t necessarily have to make money writing in order to take tax deductions on related expenses. The IRS changed its thinking on the subject, recognizing that many talented writers NEVER break even; what they look for, I’m told, is evidence of a “profit motive” — which includes professional education efforts such as going to conferences and promotional efforts like entering contests. Not all tax specialists are up on the rules for artists, though, so talk to a specialist before you begin writing things off.)

I suggested yesterday that before you plunk down the green, you do your research. Is the contest credible? If it’s run by an organization, does it have a track record for awarding outside its membership? Do the judges win their own contests? Is it plagued by scandals? How good are the benefits for the winners? Would winning or placing in this contest give you notoriety or resources that are worth the investment of entering?

In short, I suggested yesterday that you begin to think of entering literary contests as an investment in your future as a writer. There are good investments, and there are bad investments, so select carefully.

Third, ask yourself: how will winning the contest help you?

The adulation and opportunities offered to the winners vary so widely from contest to contest that it is almost impossible to generalize about any benefit accruing to all winners OTHER than boasting rights in query letters. If you do some basic checking in advance, you can save yourself quite a bit in entry fees by avoiding the contests that will not help promote you and your work.

Obviously, the ideal outcome of your winning a contest would be a situation like mine: talent and hard work recognized one second, signing with an agent the next… but I am sorry to tell you, my results were not the norm. Contests that support their winners to the extent that the PNWA does are EXTREMELY rare. I was, in a word, lucky.

Well, okay, it wasn’t JUST luck. Since I had done my homework before I entered the 2004 contest, I had learned that the PNWA bends over backwards to help its contest winners hook up with agents and editors. Not only are finalists clearly and vibrantly marked at the conference with rainbow-colored ribbons so agents and editors know who they are, but the top three entries in each category are displayed in the lobby at the conference, where everybody can read them. (Actually, if you are agent-hunting, one of the best places to troll is at this reading table between 7 and 9 a.m. on the morning after the award ceremony.) The first-place winners are invited to have breakfast with all of the agents and editors, and each winner can stand up and give a universal pitch.

This, however, is unusual. I’ve been to many conferences where contest finalists are not marked at all, and other conference attendees are far more likely to meet a finalist than any of the attending agents. This is counter-intuitive, as most conference-related contests actively encourage their finalists to trek to the awards ceremony; you’d think that they’d take the extra step of making a few introductions, but often, they do not.

If the entry fee to a contest tied to a conference is high, I would advise checking out the contest description very carefully, to make sure it is worth your while. There is no rule against dropping an e-mail to the organizers before entering and asking politely if there are secondary benefits to being a winner or a finalist.

A sneakier way to find out how winners are treated in a conference-tied contest is to talk to NON-finalists who have attended the conference in question. Where the winners are treated extremely well, other attendees tend to notice — sometimes to the extent of being unhappy about it. If your mole says, “My God, the agents there wouldn’t give the time of day to anyone who didn’t have a top ten entry!” it’s a good bet that the winners get some perks. I’d enter that contest — but not attend unless I was up for a prize.

Also, check out the list of winners from two years ago or more: how many of these writers can you find on a basic web search or by checking Amazon? In other words, are this contest’s winners getting published afterward? (Checking last year’s winners is not entirely fair, as publication seldom occurs in less than a year after a book deal is signed.) How past winners fared is an excellent indication of how you will make out if you win.

An organization that supports its contest winners will usually be proud of them, so this information tends to be quite easy to obtain. (Anyone happen to notice how the PNWA describes yours truly on its website? In terms so flattering that they make my mother blush — it’s great!) If you can find a chatty volunteer in the organization’s office — most of them will return phone calls and e-mails — see if you can elicit boasting about their post-contest success stories. Ask who their favorite winner was, and why. Ask if the organization sponsors readings for the winners, publishes excerpts, or offers other goodies to successful entrants.

All of this research will help you determine whether the contest is worth the entry fee and your prep time. As a writer — especially as a writer with a full-time job — you need to treat your writing time as precious. Three days or a week spent agonizing over a contest entry is necessarily time taken away from your actual writing, and the more expensive contest fees tend to run around the same amount as a good writing seminar. Weigh your options carefully.

It may seem a bit odd that I, of all people, should argue caution to those about to fling themselves into the literary entry ring, but I — and every contest winner I know, and I know some big ones — entered many, many contests before winning our first. We’ve all encountered contests that were worthwhile, contests that were scams, and everything in between. If you are going to hang your hopes — and your resources — on an array of contests, it honestly does pay to be selective.

Tomorrow, I shall talk about evaluating the benefits contests offer non-winners — which, like the contests themselves, vary wildly. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

In the spirit of the holiday season, I’ve decided to give all of my loyal readers a really nifty present: starting today, I shall be giving you a week’s worth of bona fide tips on how to maximize your chances of winning a writing contest, as well as guidelines to navigate your way amongst the dizzying array of contests out there. As both a former contest winner and a veteran judge of literary contests, I am here to tell you: no, Virginia, winning isn’t just about the quality of the writing. It’s about the writing AND playing the contest game well.

For those of you new to my blog, I am the poster child for literary contests: I had every writer’s fantasy come true. I won the Zola Award for Nonfiction Book/Memoir at the 2004 PNWA conference, met my fabulous agent within 12 hours after receiving the blue ribbon, and signed a publication contract with a great NYC publisher before the 2005 conference.

While such speedy results are not the norm for contest winners, winning or placing in a well-respected contest can definitely kick open a few doors. Agents pay attention to that kind of credential; it makes your query letters jump out of the daily pile. (Most queriers list no writing credentials at all, so a writer with publication credits and/or contest wins automatically looks more professional than most. Even if those credits or wins are in wildly different genres than the book being pitched. So, at the risk of seeming repetitious, you might want to consider entering the Holiday Table contest here on this very blog — see posting of December 9 for details — because the winner will receive TWO publication credits AND a legitimate contest win to dress up future queries. And did I mention that the PNWA contest deadline is only a couple of months away?)

There are a LOT of contests out there, as anyone who has ever Googled “writing contests” knows. Most, unfortunately, do not offer cash prizes, but many do offer publication. (In fact, contests are a not uncommon way for literary magazines just starting up to get good writing for free.) Almost all, however, charge an entry fee, sometimes a hefty one. As I have mentioned before, there is now an entire industry devoted to offering help to aspiring writers, and like seminars and conferences and how-to books, what the contests offer writers who enter varies widely. So just as you should learn all you can about a writers’ conference before you slap down the registration fee, before you pay to enter a contest, it would behoove you to do your homework.

First, is the contest credible?

There has been quite a bit of controversy within the last year over how various literary contests are judged. Not all are blind (meaning that the judges do not know whose entry is whose), and not all contests that claim to have blind judging actually do. It is not unheard-of, for instance, for organizations to solicit entries from outside their memberships, but only award to their own. It is not at all unusual for contests for the unpublished to allow published writers to submit their work-in-progress for judging alongside the work of the less experienced. And some observant souls pointed out earlier this year that the students of the writers who were judging contests seemed to be winning major awards on a fairly regular basis.

Obviously, this kind of pseudo-blind judging is grossly unfair to the other entrants, but the moral of this story is not that not all contests are squeaky-clean. It is no secret that there are many contests out there that solicit widely for entrants primarily as a fundraising effort, rather than a sincere attempt to discover heretofore unsung talent. Nothing bad happened to the judges who were favoring their students, so the moral is most definitely LET THE ENTRANT BEWARE.

I shall never forget the looks on the faces of everyone at the awards ceremony of a QUITE respectable Southern conference when the teenage daughter of two of the contest judges carried off the Young Writer award (and, as I recall, a not insignificant check — derived, no doubt, from the entry fees of trusting high school students). Now, her parents had actually been judging in other categories, not hers, but since they had been her first readers and were rather chatty people, the judges in her category certainly knew which entry was hers. I’m not saying that the contest was rigged, per se; I’m just saying that the mother won in the nonfiction category.

The general rule of thumb to avoid this type of situation: enter contests sponsored by organizations, not cliques. The writers’ grapevine can really help you here. Ask other writers about particular contests before you spend time and money on entering them. POETS & WRITERS magazine, which lists literary contest deadlines in each issue, does a pretty good job of screening, so if a contest seems a bit shady to you, check if it is listed in P&W.

And, of course, if you check out a list of the last few years’ winners (and you should; more on why below), and you see the same last names recurring, or see that the judges themselves seem to carry off prizes, you might want to think twice about sending in your entry.

Second, how good are your chances of winning?

Yes, any contest win or place will look nice on your writing résumé, but obviously, some contests are more prestigious than others. Less prestigious ones can actually be a better bet, if they are legitimate. When you are first starting out as a contest entrant, you might want to stick to smaller contests, where your odds are significantly better. Big-ticket contests attract stiff competition; contests with large cash prizes attract a higher percentage of professionals amongst the entrants.

Also, your chances of winning are higher if your writing resembles that of past winners. Most contests will list past winners on their websites, tucked away in a corner somewhere; check them out. If the sponsoring organization publishes winning entries, read a few. If your writing is stylistically radically different, the contest is probably not for you.

Remember, in most writers’ organizations that offer contests, the first round of reading is performed by volunteers — the same volunteers, year after year. If the volunteers favor Gothic romance, and you write futuristic fantasy, you’re probably better off saving your money and going for a different contest.

In any contest with celebrity judges (i.e., famous writers who make the final selections), this goes double. If your writing doesn’t resemble the famous judge’s in form, think twice before bothering to enter.

Even if you’re lucky enough to find a celebrity judge who is well-read outside of his own subgenre — and willing to reward work unlike his own — the bigwigs virtually never read all of the entries; commonly, they read only the finalists. That means that those crusty volunteers I mentioned above screen the entries first — and all too frequently, edge out good entries that do not resemble the celebrity’s, on the well-intentioned theory that our writing tends to reflect our reading tastes. They’re just trying to save the celebrity some time.

Tomorrow, I shall talk about what you can get out of the writing contest. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

All right, I’ll confess it: my recent hiatus was not merely so you all would have time to get your entries in for the Holiday Tables contest — the deadline of which, incidentally, has been extended to Epiphany, January 6. A wise soul pointed out to me yesterday that all of us would be garnering rich material on holiday-table interactions in the weeks to come, and I would hate to miss any of that. See my last blog for contest details.

No, my break was for another reason: I was abruptly greeted week before last with an incredibly short revision deadline from my editor. When I say incredible, I don’t mean unusual so much as improbable to be able to meet: from Thursday afternoon to Monday night.

Would I frighten you too much if I told you such a short turn-around time is not atypical?
Manhattanite attitudes toward time (punctuated thus: wait-wait-wait-I NEED IT TODAY!-wait-wait-wait-REVISE THIS BY TOMORROW-wait-wait…), combined with the fact that it takes pretty darned long to edit a manuscript, dictate that we West Coast authors are continually FedExing things across the country. (In my case, at the publisher’s expense, thank goodness.) When I see an e-mail from my editor, I automatically break out the vitamin pills. I know it’s going to be a long night.

It would be easier to e-mail chapters, of course, but the aforementioned Manhattanites tend to be working with such outdated hardware and software that transferred files don’t translate between my system and theirs. This, too, is common: ask any PNW-based established writer who works on a Mac, and you’ll get a diatribe about how her agent and/or editor can’t open any of her attachments. We’re spoiled in the PNW, you know — even non-geeks tend to know computer geeks at least casually, so we can get answers to our computer questions fairly easily.

Not so the average NYC agency or publishing house. Would you believe me if I told you that neither my agency — a major one, with more than a hundred clients — nor my publisher — also fairly large and well-to-do — employs a computer expert?

It’s hard to imagine a company of that size in say, Seattle or Portland doing without a resident computer guy, isn’t it? The sad fact is, half the publishing industry is running Windows 98 on ten-year-old PCs — and have so little computer savvy that they insist that a book’s manuscript should be one long document. (That crash you just heard was everyone at Microsoft fainting at the very thought.) As an up-to-date Mac user who knows that 350-page documents tend to be a mite unwieldy — and thus like to crash like the Hindenburg — I can only shake my head and insist upon working in paper.

Then, too, when you send something as an attachment, it is too tempting not to proof it in hard copy before you send it, which can be disastrous. Admit it — you probably have in the past tried to edit e-mailed documents right on screen, when you were in a hurry. An odd illusion most of us have, that reading on screen is faster: actually, the typical reader reads 25% MORE SLOWLY on screen than on paper. And 79% of on-screen readers scan the page, instead of reading word-for-word, as one must to do an adequate proofreading job. A mistake that looks minimal on screen, such as a repeated word, can look truly unprofessional on the page.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: proof your work in HARD COPY before you send it to professionals.

Obviously, it’s flattering the first time an editor at a real, live publishing house — or a real, living agent — asks for ultra-quick revisions. “Hey!” the author thinks, aglow with joy, “they’re super-eager to read my work! They want to rush it out the door!”

Ah, the fantasies one can construct…

Actually, the swift turnaround request from an agent is often indicative of eagerness, but from an editor, it often is not. What the last-minute rush (usually, I am sad to report, followed by weeks or months of “Oh, I haven’t had a chance to read it yet”) generally means is that the editor requesting it has pushed his side of the work until the last minute — and thus has placed you in the procrastinator’s last-minute frantic shuffle. This tendency is so common in the publishing industry that it will do you no good to complain about it, except to other authors. Sorry.

I should pause to distinguish between the last-minute editorial request for changes and what newly-signed authors often PERCEIVE to be a rush request. The latter is primarily a function of the well-justified frustration most of us feel while trying to break into the biz and the fact that agents and editors have been very good at training conference-going writers (not to mention the ones professional enough to read writers’ publications) that they are roughly as busy as the angel responsible for protecting the hides of two-year-olds worldwide. We fear to encroach upon their valuable time, so when an agent or editor asks for a change or two, many throw ourselves into the task as though the world will end if we don’t finish the revision within the week.

I have learned over the years, both from my experience and my editing clients’, to ASK up front for a deadline. This request invariably surprises agents and editors — who tend to think of writers as inveterate procrastinators; their ways are much more comprehensible if you recognize that — and makes the author look comparatively good. Not to mention the not insignificant advantage of letting the author know whether the revision is expected sometime this week or sometime this year.

In the publishing world, both are distinct possibilities.

You may not always be given a deadline when you ask, but at least you won’t be left to wallow in the dread fear that you should have overnighted the revision yesterday, and it will open the possibility of haggling for more time. Since most new writers (and actually, most established ones) have day jobs, asking for a solid deadline is important, so it is possible to save up vacation and sick days for use during deadline crunch. A good way to budget your time with a long-term deadline is to set a personal deadline two weeks or a month before the actual deadline, and plan accordingly.

If you finish before your agreed-upon deadline, great — nothing makes an author look better than being able to turn in a manuscript BEFORE a deadline. When my agent was negotiating the contract for my memoir (A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK), she asked me how quickly I thought I could finish the manuscript, so we could specify a delivery date in the contract. Prudently, I added two weeks to my estimate, since publishing houses are serious about those delivery deadlines. When I turned in the manuscript two weeks early — in other words, precisely on my personal deadline date — my editor and publisher nearly fell over from surprise.

When the genuine last-minute request does hit you, there is little you can do but hold on for the ride. Unfortunately for the author, having to be en garde constantly for the possibility of a last-minute revision request means superlative organization UP TO that point. The better you know your manuscript, the less time such revisions will take.

Think about your current manuscript: if you were asked to change a secondary plotline, or remove a minor character, how long would it take you to track down each relevant page? If you have to scroll or leaf through, it can be quite time-consuming; for how long most writers pore over their own work, it is surprising how few have read it back to front often enough to know to a certainty what falls where. If you’re in a hurry, knowing only vaguely when a contested character does or does not appear will slow you down — and increase the probability that you’ll miss a spot.

So I say it once again: you should be reading your own work on a regular basis, in hard copy. If you have a very complicated plot or a great many characters, it isn’t a bad idea to maintain a sequential list of scenes, listing who is in which. Yes, this is a lot of work, but such a well-kept list can save you literally weeks at revision time, if you need to change a character or significant plot point.

Fortunately for me, I happen to know my manuscript superlatively well, so I could put my finger on precisely the individual sentence or paragraph that needed to be moved without delay. That was not an intimacy with the text that sprang up overnight, my friends, but one born of weeks and months of going over the text, again and again. Every so often, I would print out what I had and read it straight through, like a finished book. (This is less paper-wasteful than it sounds, when you save a one-sided draft and print the next draft on the flip side. I’m notorious for raiding office recycling bins to forage for draft paper.) Even though sections have moved around, I grew to have an almost instinctive feel for what fit where. Frankly, a four-day revision would not have been possible without that level of advance knowledge.

A word to the wise, my friends. Keep up the good work.

– Anne Mini

Hello, writers —

Guess what? This is my 75th blog for the PNWA! That’s 322 pages of writing in standard format, in case you’re curious (or in case you were planning to print it all out), approximately the length of my dissertation; I’ve written shorter novels. Greater love hath no woman for an organization. When I reach Blog 100, we shall have to celebrate, perhaps with another contest.

But wait! We have a contest going on right now, and the deadline is NEXT WEEK — December 15 at midnight PST, to be precise. To save you all the trouble of leafing back through earlier postings to get to the rules, I am going to post them again today — handily enough, just before a nice weekend that just BEGS to be spent writing a superlative entry.

I have a holiday goodie to inspire your pen: the winner of this little contest will not only have his or her writing posted here, for all to read, but also on a respected literary fiction website.

Why is this double posting opportunity a particularly nifty prize? Because, dearly beloved, being posted on a third-party website DOES count as publication. You may legitimately use it as a bullet point on your writing resume and boast about it in your query letters — that’s TWO publication credits, and one contest win. Not bad for an afternoon’s work.

Trust me, if your past is shy of credentials, nothing dresses up a query letter like a paragraph citing previous publications. As I explained back in September — how long ago it seems! — agents and editors like to be the second or third person to recognize a writer’s talent, not the first. That’s why contest winners tend to attract droves of agents — someone else has already said, “Gee, this is a writer to watch.” In the publishing world, a contest win shows up like flare against a starless sky.

(Is this the right time to remind you that I landed my fabulous agent, and shortly thereafter my publishing contract, because I won the 2004 PNWA Zola Award for Nonfiction? Is it the right time to remind you that you should start working on YOUR entry for that fantastic venue, so you will be ready for the February entry deadline? No? Well, I’ll keep quiet, then — but since the publishing world is effectively shut down for the rest of the year, this would seem like the ideal time to be polishing up your contest entries, rather than querying… I just mention.)

Before I give you your assignment and deadline, let me share a tender tale of holiday festivity at Harvard. I remember this particular Thanksgiving distinctly, as it was the year that I unwisely agreed to share the festivity with my roommate’s family. Roomie’s father was a chemistry professor of great repute, and he decided that this was the year to determine experimentally just how little heat a turkey could be subjected to and still be served. In my opinion, a microwave oven was not the proper instrument to utilize for this experiment, but who was I to question the march of progress?

The following year, the professor actually won a Nobel Prize, so he must have had good ideas occasionally, but trust me, this was not one of them. When it came my turn to tell the assembled family what I was grateful for, holding hands around the holiday table, I couldn’t help glancing down at the bloody mess on my plate and blurting: “I’m grateful that I grew up in a family of excellent cooks.”

That year, I was taking an introductory Italian class, taught by a fiery European immigrant who dressed every day in fine black leather suits, claimed to be sleeping with several rather prominent 70-year-old economists then engaged in advising the current president, and moved like a panther in heat. She gave us Italian soft porn comic books to improve our vocabularies — which it certainly did! — and regularly bought out all of a particular shade of red hair dye stocked in Cambridge drug stores, so no one else would have precisely her wild shade. She liked to be noticed.

The class adored her.

Our midterm was set on the last day of class before Thanksgiving break, and for the essay section of the test, we were assigned to write a short piece on our family’s usual celebration. On the first day back from break, our teacher came flying into the room, late as usual. She crushed me to her monumental bosom, redolent of expensive leather, a trifle too much Chanel No. 19, and what I could only assume was the lingering affection of a major economist. With a resounding smack upon my startled head, she announced that I had won a bet for her with the other Italian teaching fellows.

In all of the Italian 101 sections combined, there were perhaps a hundred students, all of whom had been given the same midterm essay assignment. Out of those hundred, I had been the only one who had written a short story. Everyone else had written the Italian equivalent of:

“On Thanksgiving, our family eats turkey. My mother cooks it for a long time. I like gravy on my potatoes. At the end of the meal, we eat pie made from pumpkin, a kind of squash.”

Based upon past experience, my teacher had known that I was constitutionally incapable of writing an essay that straightforward. What won her a bottle of Veuve Cliquot was my little story about how my parents tended to invite every non-citizen they knew to our Thanksgiving repast, so my brother and I would end up vainly trying to explain the more nonsensical traditions to guests totally bewildered by them, much to my parents’ amusement. Then, when everyone was good and perplexed, my father would stand ceremoniously, holding the carving knife and fork aloft — and with a single swift stroke, slice the turkey clean through from top to bottom. Gasps galore. My mother, tireless in pursuit of that one awesome moment when a perfectly-stuffed slice of turkey fell onto the plate, as cohesive as though the whole thing were a ham, would spend hours on end boning the bird. One year, a guest fainted, and had to be revived with a rather potent Napa Valley Chardonnay. The following year, my parents made a suckling pig instead, so large that I was convinced for hours that they had cooked our Labrador retriever and hung a garland of cranberries around its neck.

What does this have to do with the contest, you ask? It points up the crying need for some more interesting stories about the holiday dinner table.

Why is it that, in writing about the festivals of our lives, we so seldom dwell upon the DISSIMILARITIES between our widely disparate families’ holiday tables? Oh, I know, there are countless scenes in movies that deal with the Thanksgiving meal: always an intact family, with parents permanently married, always the same beautifully-lit pink and beige foods heaped on the table, and almost always in a multi-story A-frame house, located somewhere in New England where the first light snow of winter wafts gently to the ground. There may be drama going on in the other rooms of the house, but in the dining room (there is always a dining room, even when the family depicted is very poor; at worst, there is the world’s largest kitchen equipped with a dining nook that would easily seat 8 adults comfortably), all is harmony and stuffing.

If I knew Thanksgiving only from movies and TV, I would think that every American was struggling to forge an adult relationship with her adorably graying upper middle class WASP parents (he, square-jawed, clean-shaven, and incapable of showing emotion to his nearest and dearest; she, stuck in some sort of arid 1950s oven cleaner ad where everything in the house remains perpetually clean with no effort) and ne’er-do-well brother/slutty sister/frigid sister played by Julianne Moore in an atmosphere of TREMENDOUS FAMILY SECRETS that everyone has known perfectly well for the last decade or two. And yet Mom (unaided, or perhaps with assistance from the non-slutty sister; extra points if she is played by Hope Davis and is an asexual corporate lawyer), bless her, always manages to get that perfect meal on the table. No one ever chokes on an underdone drumstick, and spices, beyond nutmeg and perhaps a bit of sage, are utterly unknown.

But for the vast majority of Americans, that is not the way this family festival plays out, is it? For starters, New England, as fond as the Puritans may have been of it, is a rather small portion of the country, geographically speaking, and almost none of us are actually descended from the first colonists. Westerners born and bred almost never see a white Thanksgiving (I am quite sure that when we ate suckling pig in California, I was in short sleeves), and Pacific Northwesterners generally go to Grandmother’s house over flat highways marked with grayish drizzle, rather than over the river and through the woods. Unless, of course, it is a period of especially heavy rainfall, in which case we drive our SUVs through flooded streets. Most of our trees are evergreens, so they do not change color at all, and in earthquake country, you don’t see a whole lot of multistory single-family houses, as we don’t like our kith and kin being squashed by falling rubble when the floor starts to shake unmercifully.

And that’s just how different the West Coast experience is on the OUTSIDE.

So here is your challenge, should you care to accept it: write a scene that shows what the holiday table is like in your neck of the woods, and post it via the comments function on this blog (that’s what the copy-and-paste function is for, my friends) before December 15.

Any genre is acceptable (wouldn’t you love a good Christmas murder mystery?), so feel free to submit in play format, if that’s what blows your skirt up. Or as poetry. Or as a short story, novel excerpt, or cookbook entry. What I want to see here is YOUR style of holiday table.

Standard format, please (if you don’t know what that is, do yourself a favor, and read yesterday’s posting), and nothing longer than 10 double-spaced pages. Winners will receive undying glory, an actual readership amongst your peers, and posting on a literary fiction website. Just a little resume candy to stuff your holiday stocking.

Ho, ho, ho. Keep up the good work.

– Anne Mini

A few posts ago, I promised to refresh your memories on what precisely standard format for manuscripts is. This may seem Mickey Mouse to some of you, but honestly, in my extensive travels amongst writers looking to get published, I have discovered that more often than not, the aspiring rely primarily upon instinct and observation of works in print as formatting guides. They pick typefaces on purely aesthetic grounds, play with margins and print size to make things fit well on the printed page, and occasionally even have justified margins on both the left and right sides of the page.

They are, in short, employing formatting practices that make their work unprofessional to agents and editors. And manuscripts that look unprofessional, unfortunately, tend not to be taken seriously by people in the biz.

There is a standard format for prose manuscripts in North America; why this should not be widely known is a mystery to me. I think it is unfair to writers new to the game to expect them to learn such basic requirements by trial-and-error, so periodically, I like to state — openly and without disguise — what standard format entails. Unorthodox, I know, but I’m here to help.

A manuscript, dearly beloved, is NOT an exact replica of a published book.

It differs in many small, important ways — and to editorial eyes, these difference are screaming fire sirens about the experience level of the author. A manuscript that apes the conventions of published books does not, contrary to popular belief, make the author look more professional, at least not to professional eyes. Instead, to an agent or editor, those very ostensibly expert touches brand a manuscript irrevocably as the work of an amateur.

Why is this a problem? Well, in an environment where agents receive 500 or more unsolicited submissions per week, being able to weed out the less experienced authors automatically by tossing out any submission that does not adhere to standard format speeds up going through the mail considerably.

In other words, if your manuscript is formatted correctly, it is FAR more likely to be read than if it is not.

To be absolutely honest, most of the conventions of standard format are seriously outdated. For instance, in standard format, all numbers under 100 are written out in full. The original reason for this was simple: to prevent the typesetter from making a mistake; in longhand, a 3 can look a great deal like an 8, but a three is pretty hard to mistake for an eight. Similarly, all dashes in manuscripts should be doubled, to prevent the typesetter from mistaking them for hyphens. Now that manuscripts are transmitted whole and entire via computer program, the risk of this type of mistake is significantly lower, yet the traditions of standard format remain intact.

I find it helps to think of the rigors of standard format as the manners of the publishing world. You would not stumble into a group of foreigners whom you wanted to impress and deliberately hurt their sensibilities by refusing to comply with their rituals, would you? If you met the Queen of England, would you seize the opportunity to insult her taste in hats, or would you curtsey and murmur a few polite words, like everyone else in the receiving line?

I imagine that your mother would like think that she brought you up well enough to choose the latter. Pet the corgis, admire the Queen’s hat, and get out of the palace with your head on.

Agents and editors may not have the power to chop off your head if you displease them, but they do have the authority to pronounce your manuscript dead on arrival. So the prudent course for those new to the publishing world is to learn its manners and traditions. Honoring these traditions may not guarantee your work a sympathetic reading — but on a bad day, when an agent is trying to plow through her seventieth submission in an hour, you bet your boots that deviations from standard format provide an easy excuse to toss that manuscript aside and move onto the next.

Here are the rules of standard format:

• All manuscripts must be typed and double-spaced, with at least one-inch margins on all sides of the page. No exceptions.

 

• All manuscripts are printed on ONE side of the page.

Yes, this is wasteful of paper. Deal with it.

• The text should be left justified ONLY.

Yes, books feature text that runs in straight vertical lines along the margins, and yes, your word processing program will replicate that, if you ask it nicely. But don’t: the straight margin should be the left one.

• The typeface should be 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier.

If you write screenplays, you may only use Courier. Seriously, most screenplay agents will not read even the first page of a script in another typeface.

There is a very good reason for utilizing a standardized font: in Times or Times New Roman, one double-spaced page is 250 words, rendering word count estimation easy.

• No matter how cool your desired typeface looks, or how great the title page looks with 14-point type, keep the ENTIRE manuscript in the same font and typeface. Even if the manuscript features an extensive correspondence in translated Elvish. If it’s in English, it should be in a standard typeface.

 

• Words in foreign languages should be italicized.

 

• Every page in the manuscript should be numbered.

 

• Each page contains a standard slug line in the header, listing AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/ABBREVIATED TITLE/PAGE #.

Thus, the third page of my memoir manuscript reads: MINI/A FAMILY DARKLY/3.

• The first page of a chapter should begin a third of the way down the page.

That’s twelve lines, incidentally.

• The beginning of each paragraph should be indented five spaces.

Yes, I know that published books often begin chapters and sections without indentation. Trust me, that was the editor’s choice, not the author’s. Even if every chapter ever printed by your favorite author has used this device, you will not be in a position to explain that to an agent or editor until after he has already noted that your work is not professionally presented.

• All numbers under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25.

 

• Dashes should be doubled — hyphens are single, as in self-congratulatory.

Yes, I know that your word processing program will automatically change a doubled dash to a single one. Change it back.

• Dashes should have spaces at each end — rather than—like this.

Yes, yes, I know: books no longer preserve these spaces, for reasons of printing economy. But standard format is invariable upon this point.

• The use of ANY brand name should be accompanied by the trademark symbol, as in Kleenex™

Actually, if an editor or agent is under the age of 30, you may get away without including the trademark symbol, but legally, you are not allowed to use a trademarked name without it.

Yes, I know you’ve never seen this in a finished book — that’s because the legal department at some publishing house has meticulously gone through the text of those books with a fine-toothed comb, finding brand names so they can obtain permission from their owners to use them. Save the legal department some time: flag the words.

That’s it.

I know that most of these seem petty: after all, it should be the writing that counts in a submission, not the typeface. It IS petty to privilege Times over Helvetica. Again, this is yet another of those areas where you can beat yourself bloody, railing against an illogical system, or you can just accept the status quo.

I vote for the latter. This is an industry that changes only very, very slowly: believe it or not, most NYC literary agencies still don’t even have an on-site computer wizard. It is not uncommon for e-mail attachments, the transition between Mac and PC, and the linked documents to appear as big, ugly mysteries to people who are otherwise very, very savvy. A polite person, a prudent person, a person who wants these people to like her and her work, will not rub their noses in the fact that you probably know more about computers than they do.

Trust me on this one: it’s a paper-based industry, and one that likes to see new authors respect its traditions.

Flow with it. And keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

P.S.: Don’t forget to work on your entry for the Holiday Table contest (details in my post of November 24). The deadline is December 15

For the past few days, I have been talking about how to get the most from non-professional feedback, from those readers who, not to put too fine a point on it, are neither employed in the publishing industry, being paid to read your work, nor are other writers. For most writers, their first readers do fall outside these categories — which means that most writers are dealing with first readers who have no previous experience in manuscript critique. When the writer does not set out ground rules to guide these inexperienced first readers, trouble often ensues.

The single best thing you can do to head off problems before they start is to follow Tip #8: Give written directions for feedback.

“Wait a cotton-picking minute,” I know some of you will say. “I won’t get to set up restrictions for who buys and reads my book after it is published. What’s wrong with just letting my first readers have a completely spontaneous reaction?”

Well, in the first place, buyers in bookstores will not know you personally. Their reactions, unless they happen to contact you or write reader reviews on Amazon or someplace similar, will remain a mystery to you. Your first readers, on the other hand, do know you, and presumably will be interacting with you in future social situations. They will probably want to be considerate of your feelings — which automatically makes giving honest critique even of excellent writing much harder. That’s going to kill most of the spontaneity of their reactions.

Second, when your first readers are non-professionals — that is, unless they are either being paid to read your work or are receiving critique from you in exchange, as in a class or writers’ group — they are doing the writer a great big favor. They are charming, generous people who deserve every piece of assistance a writer can give them.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the response of readers who buy your book will come after it is too late for you to revise it. By contrast, your first readers are giving you feedback early enough in the process to influence the book before it goes to press, and generally before it is seen by agents or editors. The better their feedback is, the easier it is for you to incorporate into the group.

If you are expecting your first readers to provide you feedback that you can use to revise your book, it is only fair to let them know in advance what kind of critique you are hoping to see. Providing a brief list of written questions may seem a bit pushy at first, but believe me, if your reader finds herself floundering for something to say, she will be immensely grateful that you gave her some advance guidance. And you, in turn, are far more likely to receive the kind of feedback most helpful to you than if you remain politely mum.

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

Even if you discover that you actually do not want dead-honest critique, do tell your first readers that in advance. If you feel that the whole point of showing your work to your kith and kin is to gain feedback in a supportive environment, and you want to share this important part of your life with your loved ones, that is perfectly legitimate, as long as neither you nor your first readers EXPECT you to derive informative feedback from the experience. If this is what you want, it will be FAR easier on your first readers if you tell them so explicitly: “Don’t worry about proofreading, Mom,” you can say. “I have other readers who can give me technical feedback. Just enjoy.”

If you want to be a professional writer, however, you will need to harden yourself to feedback, and good critique can be invaluable to clarifying fuzzy places in the book. If this is what you want (and you are asking non-professionals to give it), then it is only courteous to take the time to set out exactly the questions you want your first readers to have in mind while they read.

Tomorrow, I shall wrap up this subject. In the meantime, why not take a few minutes to polish your entry for the Holiday Table contest? (Details in my November 24 posting; the deadline is December 15.) It easy to enter, and the winner will receive two bona fide publication credits! Enter today!

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Only ten more days to get your entry in for the Holiday Table contest! Full details in my November 24 post. Show us your stuff!

For the last few posts, I’ve been writing about how to improve the feedback you’re getting from non-professional readers — i.e., first readers of your work who are neither freelance editors, agents, editors at publishing houses, or paid writing teachers. In a publishing environment where agents and editors simply do not have the time to give in-depth responses to queries, writers hit up their friends — who all too often are too polite to say no or, heaven help us, think that giving feedback on a manuscript-in-progress is a jaunty, light-hearted, casual affair, as simple and easy as reading a book on a beach.

Tee hee. Imagine their surprise when they start reading, and learn that you expect them not to be passive consumers of prose, but active participants in the creative process.

Writers tend to complain about the feedback they get from kind souls decent enough to donate their time to feedback, but let’s pause for a moment and think about the position of a friend impressed into first reader duty. Chances are, this friend (I’ll call her Gladys because it looks good in print) committed herself to reading the manuscript without quite realizing that she’d done it. From a non-writer’s POV, “Oh, I’d love to read your work sometimes” is generally NOT an actual invitation to share a manuscript; for most people, it’s just a polite thing to say.

For the sake of Gladys and every kind soul like her, adhere to Tip #7: Make sure IN ADVANCE that your first readers fully understand what you expect them to do — and that it is significantly more complicated than merely reading a book.

I can tell you right now that 99% of casual offerers have no idea what to do with a manuscript when it is handed to them. Gladys is generally dismayed when someone takes her up on her request. Like most people, dear Gladys did not have a very good time in school, and you have just handed her a major reading comprehension assignment; in a flash, you have become her hated 8th-grade English teacher, the one who used to throw his keys at kids who walked in late. In her sinking heart, she is afraid of the book report she is going to have to give at the end of the process.

So what does Gladys do? Typically, she doesn’t read the book at all. Or she launches eagerly into it, reading perhaps ten or fifteen pages, then gets sidetracked by the phone ringing or piled-up laundry or the need to go to work. (Remember, she isn’t a writer, so she does not have much experience in wresting precious minutes of concentration time out of a busy day.) However good her intentions may have been at first, somehow the book falls to her lowest priority — and very few people lead lives so calm that a week of nothing to do suddenly opens up for their lowest-priority projects. Like the writer who keeps telling himself that he can only work if he has an entire day (or week or month) free, our well-meaning Gladys wakes up in six months astonished to find that she hasn’t made significant inroads on her task.

I once had a first reader who BEGGED to read a manuscript for weeks on end. Six months later, I asked for it back, even if she hadn’t read it. As it turned out, she hadn’t, but she had filled the margins of Ch. 1 with glowing praise, concluding with, “You couldn’t PAY me to stop reading now!”

She stopped reading three pages later.

Gladys intends to get back to it, she really does, but my goodness, when is she going to find the time? It’s not as though a manuscript is bound, like a book, rendering it easy to tote around and read in spare moments. Over time, she tends to start to resent the task. Most often, this resentment manifests in holding on to your manuscript indefinitely.

Frankly, this is maddening. We expect our friends to devour our books, relish them, and call us in the dead of night to say that it’s the best book they’ve ever read. (C’mon, admit it.) While most of us are astonishingly patient with agents and editors who do not respond to queries or hold on to manuscripts that they’ve asked to see for months at a time, we’re seldom as patient with our first readers, are we? The writer too timid to call an agent who’s had a requested three chapters for a year will often go ballistic at the friend who’s had the same pages for the same length of time. Odd, considering that the agent is being paid to read work, and the friend isn’t, but that’s the way we feel.

Once the situation has gone this far, it’s quite hard to fix it without resentment. The only way to get out of the situation gracefully is to call the remiss Gladys (or send her an e-mail, if you’re afraid that you’ll yell at her) and politely ask for the manuscript back. Ignore her protests that she is really intending to get to it soon, honest, because she won’t. Cast your request as having nothing to do with her: “Manuscripts are actually pretty expensive to produce, and I’ve just found the perfect person to give me feedback on it. Would you mind if I saved a little money by passing your copy on to him?”

This may sound a bit nasty, but believe me, it’s less confrontational than almost anything else you could say. Just accept that Gladys had no idea how much time it would take, and move on. And say no the next time she offers. (Astonishingly, the Gladyses of the world — Gladioli?) — often do. They must be insulating their attics with their hapless friends’ unread manuscripts.) Tell her that you’ve decided to rely on professional feedback this time around.

Whatever you do, don’t sit around and seethe in silence. Say something, and don’t let it wait too long. If you do not take action, Gladys will eventually have to come up with a strategy to deal with her obligation — and what she comes up with may not be very pleasant for you.

Often, Gladioli will turn their not having realized that reading a book draft is a serious time commitment into a critique of the book. Well, I would have read it, but it was too long. I was really into it, but then a plot twist I didn’t like came in, and I just couldn’t go on. I liked it, but it didn’t move fast enough. These all might be legitimate criticisms from someone who has actually read the manuscript, but from a non-finisher, they should be disregarded. They are excuses, not serious critique. Please do not allow them to hurt your feelings, because they are not really about the book — they are about the feedback process.

When you hear this type of critique used as an excuse for not reading, thank Gladys profusely, as if she has just given the Platonic piece of feedback. Tell her that you know in your heart she is right, and you don’t want her to read another word until you’ve had time to revise. Get the manuscript back as soon as possible. Then rush out and find another first reader.

“My secret, if I must reveal it,” quoth the illustrious Alexis de Tocqueville, “is to flatter their vanity while disregarding their advice.”

Advance planning can go a long way toward avoiding this situation. Observe Tip #7a: give a deadline at the outset. While you are explaining what it is you would like your first reader to do, mention that in order for the feedback to be useful to you, you will need it within a month. That’s long enough for a spare-time reader to get through pretty much any manuscript without sleepless nights, so you need not feel as though you are proposing a pop quiz. After that (you will explain kindly), while you will value Gladys’ opinion, you will not have time to incorporate it. Being able to turn the book around that quickly (you will tell her) is the difference between being the kind of helpful friend who gets thanked in acknowledgments and the kind of friend who is appreciated in private.

After you state the deadline, ASK if it will be a problem. If Gladys hesitates at all, tell her that it’s perfectly okay to say no. In fact, you would appreciate it, because you are at a point in your career where you need prompt feedback, and while she was your first choice, you do have others lined up. (Say this whether it is true or not; it will make it easier for her to decline if she feels overwhelmed.) By allowing her the chance to bow out BEFORE you’ve gone to all the trouble of printing up a complete manuscript, you are underscoring that you realize that she is promising something significant, and you appreciate it.

A week before the deadline, call or e-mail, to ask how the reading is going. This will give Gladys another opportunity to back out, if she is feeling swamped. (If she asked to read your manuscript out of simple curiosity — a very common motivation — she will have realized it by now.) Set up a specific date and time to get the manuscript back. Promise to take her out to lunch or to bring her chocolates — after all, she’s been doing you a big favor.

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

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

Your writing deserves to be taken seriously, my friends — and the more you take it seriously, by seeking feedback in a professional manner, the better it will become. Tomorrow, I shall discuss how to elicit specific information from your first readers, to get answers to problems you already know exist in the book.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

‘Twas the week after Thanksgiving, and all through the publishing houses, not a creature was stirring, not even that junior editor who swore to you at a conference last summer that she’d get to your submission within a month. So let’s let the literary world alone for its long winter nap and move on to matters that we writers can control, eh?

First, don’t forget to start polishing up your entries for the Holiday Table contest (details in my Thanksgiving post). Wow me and the editor of a respected literary fiction website with your piece about the holiday table, and you’ll gain eternal fame, via being posted here and on said literary site. (And yes, you can legitimately use that as a publication credit, quoth the ghost of query letters yet to come) So keep those entries rolling in — the deadline is December 15.

I devoted yesterday’s post to a few helpful hints on how to get good feedback from non-professional readers. (The standard professional readers are agents, editors — freelance and otherwise — and teachers, but agents and editors seldom have time to give significant feedback, and classes and freelance editing cost money.) Yesterday’s hints, as you may have noticed, concentrated on asking the right people to read your manuscript. A LOT of standard first reader problems can be avoided by simply not asking people who are not qualified to read your book to read your manuscript.

I hear some of you out there humphing. “Yeah, right,” some of you are grumbling audibly, “she’s a professional writer and editor with a Ph.D. She probably doesn’t think ANYONE is qualified to read a book.”

Actually, depending on your genre or field, a highly-educated person can be the WORST first reader imaginable. If you were writing for, say, fifth graders, your ideal first readers would be a classroom full of kids, not a symposium full of philosophy professors.

However, relatively few aspiring writers actively seek members of their target audiences as first readers. Why not? Well, most of the ones I’ve polled have said it’s just easier to ask people they already know — and it turns out that writers aren’t necessarily aware of what their friends do or do not read.

So how do you find a qualified reader? Tip #3: ask people about their reading habits BEFORE you ask them to read your manuscript. Do this even if — and perhaps even especially if — someone has expressed an interest in reading your manuscript simply out of friendship. In my experience, such people, while kind and encouraging, often do not realize just how much time it takes to read a manuscript carefully. Often, these folks end up not finishing it at all or giving inadequate feedback, just because they did not budget adequate time to read well.

You need not give potential readers the third degree; take ’em out for coffee and spend half an hour chatting about books. (This is also a pretty good idea to do with members of any writing group you are thinking about joining. How a person speaks about his literary likes and dislikes will tell you a lot about whether he is a good reader for your work.) You may feel as though you are conducting a job interview, but honestly, you will be trusting your first readers to hold a significant part of your ego in their hands. You wouldn’t trust your teeth to a dentist without credentials or previous mouth-related experience, would you? Are the nerve endings in your mouth really more sensitive than your feelings about your work?

Having this little chat will make it significantly easier for you to implement Tip #4: get feedback from people in your target audience.

This is slightly different than yesterday’s Tip #2, which advised getting feedback from inveterate readers of your chosen genre or field, who would be familiar with the conventions, limitations, and joys possible in books like yours. People in your target audience, however, may not yet have read a book like yours, but for reasons that you are VERY eager to explain to your dream agent, these target readers need desperately to read your work.

For instance, let’s say you’ve written a lifestyle book for former high school athletes who no longer exercise — a rather large demographic. Three of your five chapters are filled with recipes for bran muffins, salads, and trail mix. Naturally, you would want to include among your first readers someone familiar with cookbooks, as well as someone who reads a lot of exercise books. However, it would be well worth your while to seek out a jock from your old high school who has never opened either a cookbook or exercise book before. If you can make your book work for your old volleyball buddy, you’ll know you have a good shot at writing for people like her. (Hey, you might as well get SOME use from all of those nagging messages Classmates.com keeps sending you about getting back in touch with old playmates, right?)

If you are a member of a writers’ group, and you have not been getting useful feedback, you might want to consider whether its members actually are in your target demographic. Look very carefully at your first readers and ask yourself: are these the kind of people I expect to buy my book? If they did not know me, would they buy it at all? If the answer to either is no, go out and find some people who are and will, pronto. I know an excellent children’s book illustrator who, every time she finishes a rough draft, routinely hangs out with her sketchpad in the picture book sections of bookstores, stopping every kid she sees to ask if the pictures she has just completed match the captions well enough. She gets TERRIFIC feedback, from precisely the right people.

You may have noticed that from talking about one or two first readers, I am now speaking of several for a single project. Your work is complex, right? It may be very difficult to find the single ideal best reader for it. So why not mix and match your friends to create an ideal composite reader?

Tip #5: Find different readers for different needs.

Most of us would like to think that anything we write will invariably touch any given reader, but in actuality, that’s seldom the case. Nor is it often the case that we happen to have an array of first readers easily at our disposal — although, again, if you join a good writers’ group, you will in fact have gained precisely that. In the absence of such a preassembled group, though, you can still cobble together the equivalent, if you think long and hard about what individual aspects of your book could use examination. Once you’ve identified these needs, you can ask each of your chosen readers to read very explicitly with an eye to her own area of expertise, so to speak.

In the lifestyle book example above, it was easy to see how readers from different backgrounds could each serve the book. With fiction, however, the book’s various needs may be more subtle, harder to define. In a pinch, you can always fall back on finding a reader in the same demographic as a particular character — I know a lot of teenagers who get a big kick out of critiquing adult writers’ impressions of what teenage characters are like. If a major character is an accountant, try asking an accountant to read the book for professional accuracy. Even if you are writing about vampires or fantasy creatures, chances are that some regular Joes turn up in your stories from time to time.

And so forth. But make sure when you approach these people — or any others — you follow Tip #6: couch your request in a compliment. Ideally, you would like these potential first readers to be flattered that you asked. Try asking like this:

“I trust your eye implicitly, so I am really looking for proofreading here.”

“Your comic timing is so good — would you mind flagging the jokes that you think don’t work?”

There’s no need to make up extravagant praise — just be very clear about why you are asking that particular person for feedback. Why is this person THE person to read your book?

Next time, I shall discuss how to frame your request for feedback in ways that will encourage useful commentary. In the meantime, ponder this: note how I have turned the issue of who makes a good first reader from a question of who your friends are to a question of what does the book need. This was deliberate, because this is the single biggest mistake I see good aspiring writers make in seeking feedback: they forget that the feedback process is not about helping the writer, but about helping the manuscript.

Keep that vital distinction foremost in your mind, and I promise you, you are far less likely to hand your beloved baby over to the first careless coworker who says, “Gee, I’d love to read some of your work sometime.” The writer may be flattered by such attention, but the manuscript deserves not to be sent on blind dates. Choose your first readers with care.

Have a lovely weekend, everybody. And keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini