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

For the last few days, I have been writing about the keynote, the single-sentence grabber for your book. Again, to make it absolutely clear: I am not suggesting that you routinely utilize only a single sentence to promote your book in person or in print — the keynote is designed to help open doors, not to serve as a substitute for the pitch. Yesterday, I gave some examples of how to use it. Today, I’m going to give a few tips on how to spice it up.

You didn’t think I was just going to urge you to buttonhole agents in conference hallways without showing you how to do it politely, did you?

Remember, the keynote is NOT a summary of your book; it’s a teaser intended to attract an agent or editor into ASKING to hear your pitch. So you will want to make it — say it with me now — MEMORABLE.

How does a novelist accustomed to page-long descriptions pull that off? Don’t be afraid to use strong imagery, particularly strong sensual imagery. If you’re ever going to use adjectives, this is the time. “What would you do if you suddenly found yourself knee-deep in moss everywhere you went?” is not as strong a keynote as “The earth will be covered thirty feet deep in musty grey lichen in three days — and no one believes the only scientist who can stop it.”

Notice how effective it was to bring in the element of conflict? Your keynote should make your book sound dramatically exciting — even if it isn’t. You shouldn’t lie, obviously, but this is the time to emphasize lack of harmony.

I’m quite serious about this. If I were pitching a book set in a convent where nuns spent their days in silent contemplation of the perfections of the universe, I would make the keynote sound conflict-ridden. How? Off the top of my head: “What would you do if you’d taken a vow of silence — but the person you worked with every day had a habit that drove you mad?”

Okay, perhaps habit was a bit much. But you get my drift: in a keynote, as in a pitch, being boring is the original sin. Thou shalt not do that on my watch.

I would advise emphasizing conflict, incidentally, even if the intent of the book were to soothe. A how-to book on relaxation techniques could accurately be keynoted as, “Wrap your troubles in lavender; this book will teach you how to sleep better,” but that’s hardly a grabber, is it? Isn’t “What would you do if you hadn’t slept in four nights?” is actually a better keynote.

Why? Experienced book-promoters, chant it with me now: because the latter encourages the hearer to want to hear more. And that, by definition, is a more successful come-on.

Oh, as if both pitching and querying weren’t a species of seduction? Or, if you prefer, species of storytelling. As Madame de Staël so memorably wrote a couple of centuries ago, “One of the miracles of talent is the ability to tear your listeners or readers out of their own egoism.”

And that’s about as poetic a definition of marketing artistic work that you’re going to find. Use the keynote to alert ‘em to the possibility that you’re going to tell them a story they’ve never heard before.

Another effective method for a keynote is to cite a problem — and immediately suggest that your book may offer a plausible solution. This works especially well for NF books on depressing subjects. A keynote that just emphasizes the negative, as in, “Human activity is poisoning the oceans,” is, unfortunately, more likely to elicit a shudder from an agent or editor than, “Jacques Cousteau said the oceans will die in our lifetimes — and here’s what you can do about it.”

Fact of living in these post-Enlightenment days, I’m afraid: we like problems to have solutions.

Remember how I urged you to ask advice givers how they know their techniques will work? I can tell you from recent personal experience that the problem/solution keynote can be very effective with dark subject matter: there are two — count ‘em, TWO — dead babies in the sample chapter of my latest book proposal, and scores of preventably dying adults. It’s a fascinating story (I can say that, because I’m writing about someone else), but let me tell you, I really had to sell that to my agents, even though they already had a high opinion of my writing. If I’d just told them, “There are scores of people dying because of a plant that produces something that’s in every American household,” we all would have collapsed into a festival of sobs, but by casting it as, “There are scores of people dying because of a plant that produces something that’s in every American household — and this is the story of a woman who has been fighting to change that,” the book sounds like a beacon of hope. Which I sincerely hope it will be.

I’m pleased to report that it’s in the hands of editors as I write this — but if I had stubbornly insisted upon trying to pique everyone’s interest with only the sad part of the story, I doubt it would have gotten out of the starting gate. My agents, you see, harbor an absurd prejudice for writing that they believe they can sell.

They were right to be concerned, you know. Heads up for those of you who deal with weighty realities in your work: even if a book is politically or socially important, heavy subject matter tends to be harder to sell, regardless of whether you are pitching it verbally or querying it. Particularly if the downer subject matter hasn’t gotten much press attention. This is true whether the book is fiction or nonfiction, interestingly enough.

Why? Well, think about it: an agent or editor who picks up a book is committing to live with it on a fairly intensive basis for at least a year, often more. Even with the best intentions and working with the best writing, that can get pretty depressing.

So it’s a very good idea to accentuate the positive, even in the first few words you say to the pros about your book. And avoid clichés like the proverbial plague, unless you put a clever and ABSOLUTELY original spin on them.

Actually, that’s a good rule of thumb for every stage of book marketing: remember, you’re trying to convince an agent or editor that your book is UNIQUE. Reproducing clichés without adding to them artistically just shows that you’re a good listener, not a good creator.

If you can provoke a laugh or a gasp with your keynote, all the better. Remember, though, even if you pull off the best one-liner since Socrates was wowing ‘em at the Athenian agora, if your quip doesn’t make your BOOK memorable, rather than you being remembered as a funny or thought-provoking person, the keynote has not succeeded.

Let me repeat that, because it’s a subtle distinction. The goal of the keynote is not to make you sound like a great person, or even a great writer — it’s to make them interested in your BOOK. After all, realistically, they’re not going to learn that you’re a fabulous writer until they read some of your prose, and while I’m morally certain that to know, know, know my readers is to love, love, love them, that too is something the industry is going to have to learn over time.

And remember, good delivery is not the same thing as book memorability. I once went to a poetry reading at conference that STILL haunts my nightmares. A fairly well-known poet, who may or may not come from a former Soviet bloc country closely associated in the public mind with vampire activity, stalked in and read, to everyone’s surprise, a prose piece. I don’t remember what it was about, except that part of the premise was that he and his girlfriend exchanged genitals for the weekend.

And then, as I recall, didn’t do anything interesting with them. (Speaking of the downsides of not adding artistically to a well-worn concept.)

Now, this guy is a wonderful public reader. To make his (rather tame) sexual tale appear more salacious, every time he used an Anglo-Saxon word relating to a body part or physical act, he would lift his eyes from the page and stare hard at the nearest woman under 40. I’ll spare you the list of words aimed at me, lest my webmaster wash my keyboard out with soap; suffice it to say, some of them would have made a pirate blush. By the end of his piece, everyone was distinctly uncomfortable — and remembered his performance.

But when I get together with writer friends who were there to laugh about it now, can any of us recall his basic storyline? No.

Notice what happened here — he made his PERFORMANCE memorable by good delivery, rather than his writing. Sure, I remember who he is — I’m hardly likely to forget a man who read an ode to his own genitalia, am I? (I suspect all of us women under 40 would have been substantially more impressed if someone ELSE had written an ode to his genitalia, but that’s neither here nor there.)

But did his flashy showmanship make me rush out and buy his books of poetry? No. Did it make me avoid him at future conferences like the aforementioned proverbial plague? Yes.

This is a problem shared by a LOT of pitches, and even more Hollywood Hooks: they’re all about delivery, rather than promoting the book in question. Please don’t make this mistake; unlike other sales situations, it’s pretty difficult to sell a book concept on charm alone. Even if you’re the next Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, or strange Eastern European sex fiend/poet.

Drama, conflict, vivid imagery, shock, cause for hope — that’s all memorable. And that’s extremely important, when you will be talking to someone who will have had 150 pitches thrown at him already that day.

Believe it or not, we’re right on schedule for ramping up to the pitch proper. Tomorrow, I shall show you how to transform what you’ve already learned into a great opening gambit. Think of it as my present to the shy. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Last night, as I was coming home from my writers’ group meeting (yes, I’m still a member of a writers’ group; no matter where one is on the publication trail, mutual support is always nice), I stumbled upon a sight that struck me as emblematic of conference season: on my porch, I found a minuscule baby raccoon tap-dancing in my outdoor cat’s food bowl, while Kitty watched with incredulous disapproval. The little one was having a whale of a good time, apparently.

You might want to try to keep this image in my head for the next few months, as a visual metaphor for how confusing the plethora of advice one typically receives at a conference can be. As Kitty can tell you, there’s a proper way to treat cat food, and she doesn’t think it’s at all funny when kibble is put to any other purpose. But the baby raccoon, although comparatively inexperienced with cat bowls, discovered that kibble emits a pretty fabulous sound when scuffled upon, not to mention bouncing gratifyingly when flung at nearby doors, walls, writers, what have you. It was great, chaotic fun while it lasted, but ultimately, most of the food was unfit for critter consumption.

Why did this dynamic remind me of a writers’ conference, you ask? Well, let me put it this way: your book is the kibble. Kitty is the battle-hardened writer/editor/writing teacher/contest judge who has been haunting conferences for years, preaching the gospel of avoiding flashy, trendy pitching and submission techniques in favor of the solid basics that have worked for decades. Place food in bowl, clear way for cat: in her mind, it’s that simple.

The raccoon is the purveyor of the newest ideas about how to beat the system. He doesn’t always appear as a teacher at the conference, but boy, is he compelling to watch. Sometimes, he’s an agent who decides to present his personal preferences for literature as inviolable rules for the industry. Sometimes, he’s the guy selling the latest book on how to market your book, whose success depends upon coming up with something new to say about a very written-about system. And sometimes, he’s the guy sitting next to you at lunch, passing on rumors about non-existent agent conspiracies to agree to reject any book that’s been submitted to more than five of them and warning you never to submit to more than one agent at once.

He’s definitely more fun to watch than Kitty, I’ll give him that. It’s tempting to believe him. Only two problems: what he’s saying isn’t always 100% accurate, and like raccoons, one tends to encounter a whole bunch of ‘em at once. Since they all contradict one another, which should you believe?

That’s up to you, of course. But perhaps thinking of such types as baby raccoons, rather than as authority figures, will prompt you to ask the requisite questions to discover whether this raccoon is the one to be trusted: “Have you ever sold/acquired a book using this technique? Can you tell me about it?”

My tendency, I must admit, is to distrust pretty much any one-size-fits-all solution to getting published, and my suspicion rises markedly the more often its promoter swears it will always work. Take the ubiquitous 3-line pitch, for instance. I once asked a screenplay agent who habitually taught a class on how three-line pitches were the answer to every sales situation for creative work how he would pitch THE REMAINS OF THE DAY, a book light on plot but strong on character development.

What would one say? A butler butles quietly for years on end? Hardly a grabber.

Without missing a beat, the agent answered, “I would just pitch it as, ‘based on the bestselling book.’”

I love this answer, because it illustrates the point of the keynote so beautifully: the message itself is less important than the fact that you get your hearer’s eyebrows to shoot up.

And, contrary to what vast majority of pitching advice out there dictates, it shows that what might work in a screenplay pitch (which is where the 3-line pitch comes from; it’s not indigenous to the publishing world) does not always work in pitching a novel.

Or any book, for that matter. Especially in those swift thirty seconds when you and the agent of your dreams are both bending over the pasta bar at lunch, or you happen to run into her in a conference hallway. And that, my friends, is when having a keynote prepared pays off in spades.

But don’t prep it because I told you so; I might be just another tap-dancing raccoon with a good agent, for all you know. Make me tell you why it might help you.

Okay, since you twisted my arm: a keynote will allow you to be able to sound out someone in a hallway about interest in your book, to give an agent or editor an instant, ready-made hook to sell your work, and to be able to sound like a professional writer on a moment’s notice.

None of these are abilities at which you should be sneezing, incidentally. Since agents routinely have to boil 400-page novels down to just a line or two, these are attributes they genuinely respect.

Especially the last benefit on the list, interestingly enough. One of the biggest differences between a professional writer and one who is new to the biz is how she answers the ubiquitous question, “So, what do you write?” Almost invariably, those unused to the question will betray their inexperience by shilly-shallying, giving evasive answers like:

(Enormous sigh, as if even thinking about it were a chore) “Well, I guess it’s a coming-of-age story about a boy whose father works in a steel mill and whose mother is a maid and his older sister is a tramp and…” (Insert 15 minutes’ worth of description here.) “…and it’s partially autobiographical.”

A professional, on the other hand, will promptly tell the questioner in a couple of brief sentences the book category in which she writes, along with a quick quip or two about her most recent project. Not a long-winded speech, or boasts about her own writing talent, just a snippet about the book itself, to see if her auditor is interested before moving into more detail.

And if the auditor says, “That sounds interesting, but I don’t represent that book category,” the professional writer thanks him quickly and moves on, feelings unhurt, to see if anyone else in the room DOES handle her kind of book.

Apart from the fact that such urbane behavior tends to strike other writers as enviably cool, agents and editors really, really like to see unpublished writers exhibit the latter behavior. Why? Because they are acutely, even exaggeratedly, aware of how busy they are.

Try not to take this personally. In their native habitat, recall, these are people who fly into a fury if the woman in front of them in the deli line hesitates for fifteen seconds between pastrami or roast beef on her sandwich. Just because they are our guests in the more laid-back regions of the country or the world for a few days doesn’t mean that they shed that Manhattanite resentment of people who waste entire nanoseconds of their precious time. To quote those immortal social philosophers, the Bee Gees, all we can do is “try to understand/New York time’s effect on man.”

Get to the point as fast as you can without actually being impolite.

Some writers don’t like to be perceived as tooting their own horns, which is understandable. But to someone trying to get a quick impression of whether a writer’s work might be worth sampling, demurrals do not come across as charming self-deprecation, but as an annoying disregard of the industry’s unspoken limit to how long a writer gets to take up an agent or editor’s time.

No matter what anyone tells you, if you are over the age of 10, displays of winsome insecurity are just not cute. Certainly not on a scale of baby raccoons to waddling ducks, anyway.

Let me give you a non-writing example to demonstrate how irritating such waffling can be. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate — something I do not tell people lightly, as they either take an instantaneous dislike to me, assuming that I must be a snob, or glom onto me, assuming that I have the private ears of kings and presidents alike, having gone to college with them. (The old university joke illustrates the third, even less appetizing possibility: how does a pretty woman get men to leave her alone in a bar? She starts a rumor that she went to Harvard.)

For these reasons, many of us who did time in the Yard choose not to share our educational background in social settings. So when you ask many of my classmates where they went to school, they will respond evasively, “In the Boston area.”

Now, to any Harvardian, that automatically declares that the speaker went to Harvard; people who went to MIT or Tufts tend to say so.

But to anyone who doesn’t know the code, it sounds like an invitation to further questions, doesn’t it? So all too often, the subsequent conversation degenerates into a cutesy guessing game, with the Harvardian giving more and more evasive answers until the questioner loses all patience and shouts, “What — did you go to Harvard or something?”

To which directness there is no possible response other than a winsome blush and a nod. Modesty preserved, at the expense of five minutes of everyone’s all-too-short life.

This is precisely what it sounds like to people in the publishing industry when you equivocate about what you write. They don’t like guessing games, as a rule.

Okay, out comes my fairy godmother wand again: the next time you hear yourself start to equivocate about what you write, I decree that you will start seeing a music video of STAYING ALIVE lip-synced by dancing raccoons playing in the back of your head on a continuous loop. Surely, any sane person will be willing to go to virtually any length to avoid that dreadful fate…so don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Tomorrow, I shall discuss how to USE your newly-constructed keynote to wow not all and sundry at a writers’ conference, or to insert it willy-nilly into your next query letter, but rather to pull it out of your pocket at the time and place where it’s going to do you the most good. Because this is one kitty who prefers to be prepared for anything.

Keep up the good work!

Welcome back to my ongoing series on marketing your work — be it in a pitch, query, or submission. In my last few posts, I have been talking about how to generate a list of selling points. This may seem like a pain to generate, but believe me, it is hundreds of times easier to land an agent for a book if you know why readers will want to buy it.

Trust me, “I spent three years writing it!” is not a reason that is going to fly very well with agents and editors.

Apart from the very real benefits having such a list by your side when pitching, I like to ask writers about their books’ selling points before they pitch or query in order to pull the pin gently on a grenade that can be pretty devastating to the self-esteem. A lot of writers mistake professional questions about marketability for critique, hearing the fairly straightforward question, “So, why would someone want to read this book?” as “Why on earth would ANYONE want to read YOUR book? It hasn’t a prayer!” Deriving this impression, some writers shrink away from agents and editors who ask it — a reluctance to hear professional feedback which, in turn, can very easily lead to an unwillingness to pitch or query.

“They’re all so mean,” such writers say, firmly keeping their work out of the public eye.

This response makes me sad, because the only book that hasn’t a prayer of being published is the one that is never submitted at all. There are niche markets for practically every taste, after all. Your job in generating selling points is to SHOW (not tell) that there is indeed a market for your book.

So back to possible bullet points:

(9) Recent press coverage. People in the publishing industry have a respect for the printed word that borders on the irrational. Thus, if you can find recent articles related to your topic, list them as evidence that the public is eager to learn more about it.

Possible example (and please note that I made up all of the examples throughout this series off the top of my head, so don’t quote me on any of this): so far in 2007, the CHICAGO TRIBUNE has run 347 articles on mining accidents, pointing to a clear media interest in the safety of mine shafts.

(10) Your book’s relation to current events and future trends. I hesitate to mention this one, because it’s actually not the current trends that dictate whether a book pitched or queried now will fly off the shelves after it is published: it’s the events that will be happening THEN.

Current events are inherently tricky, since it takes a long time for a book to move from proposal to bookstand. Ideally, your pitch to an agent should speak to the trends of at least two years from now, when the book will actually be published.

(In response to that loud unspoken “Whaaa?” I just heard out there: after you land an agent, figure one year for you to revise it to your agent’s specifications and for the agent to market it — a conservative estimate, incidentally — and another year between signing the contract and the book’s actually hitting the shelves. If my memoir had been printed according to its original publication timeline, it would have been the fastest agent-signing to bookshelf progression of which anyone I know had ever heard: 16 months, a positively blistering pace.)

If you can make a plausible case for the future importance of your book, do it here. You can also project a current trend forward. Some examples: at its current rate of progress through the courts, Christopher Robin’s habeas corpus case will be heard by the Supreme Court in late 2009 – guaranteeing substantial press coverage for Pooh’s exposé, OUT OF THE TOY CLOSET; if tooth decay continues at its current rate, by 2012, no Americans will have any teeth at all. Thus, it follows that a book on denture care should be in ever-increasing demand.

(11) Particular strengths of the book. You’d be surprised at how well a statement like, “BREATHING THROUGH YOUR KNEES is the first novel in publishing history to take on the heartbreak of kneecap displasia,” can work in a pitch or a query letter. If it’s true, that is.

So what is your book’s distinguishing characteristic? How is it different and better from other offerings currently available within its book category? How is it different and better than the most recent bestseller on the subject?

One caveat: avoid cutting down other books on the market; try to point out how your book is GOOD, not how another book is bad. Publishing is a small world: you can never be absolutely sure that the person to whom you are pitching DIDN’T go to college with the editor of the book on the negative end of the comparison.

I would STRONGLY urge those of you who write literary fiction to spend a few hours brainstorming on this point. How does your book deal with language differently from anything else currently on the market? How does its dialogue reveal character in a new and startling way? Why might a professor choose to teach it in an English literature class?

Again, remember to stick to the FACTS here, not subjective assessment. It’s perfectly legitimate to say that the writing is very literary, but don’t say that the writing is gorgeous.

Even if it undeniably is.

Why not? Well, that’s the kind of assessment that publishing types tend to trust only if it comes from one of three sources: a well-respected contest (in the form of an award), the reviews of previous publications — and the evidence of their own eyes.

Seriously, this is a notorious industry pet peeve: almost universally, agents and editors tend to respond badly when a writer actually SAYS that his book is well-written; they want to make up their minds on that point themselves. In fact, it’s not at all unusual for agents to tell their screeners to assume that anyone who announces in a query letter that this is the best book in the Western literary canon is a bad writer. Next!

So be careful not to sound as if you are boasting. If you can legitimately say, for instance, that your book features the most sensitive characterization of a dyslexic 2-year-old ever seen in a novel, that will be heard as a statement of fact, not a value judgment.

Stick to what is genuinely one-of-a-kind about your book — and don’t be afraid to draw direct factual comparisons with other books in the category that have sold well recently. For example: while Jennifer Anniston’s current bestseller, EYESHADOW YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS, deals obliquely with the problem of eyelash loss, my book, EYELASH: THE KEY TO A HAPPY, HEALTHY FUTURE, provides much more detailed guidelines on eyelash care.

(12) Research. If you have done significant research or extensive interviews for the book, list it here.

Some possible examples: Leonardo DiCaprio has spent the past eighteen years studying the problem of hair mousse failure, rendering him one of the world’s foremost authorities; Bruce Willis interviewed over 600 married women for his book, HOW TO KEEP THE PERFECT MARRIAGE.

(13) Promotion already in place. Having a website already established that lists an author’s bio, a synopsis of the upcoming book, and future speaking engagements carries a disproportionate weight in the publishing industry — because, frankly, by the standards of almost any American currently under the age of 30, the average agent or editor is barely computer-literate. Most major agencies don’t even employ in-house IT support, for heaven’s sake.

You didn’t hear it from me, of course. But let’s just say that you shouldn’t be surprised when the agent who is demanding that you e-mail your latest revision immediately is still running Windows 95 on a computer that was old when you graduated from college. Or that despite the fact that Macs represent roughly 15% of the consumer computer market, and are favored disproportionately by creative artists, several of the major publishing houses STILL cannot open Word documents created on them.

If I told you that I have experienced both of these phenomena within the last six months, would you faint?

Suffice it to say that almost any web-based marketing plan you may have is going to come across as impressive. Consider having your nephew (or some similarly computer-savvy person who is fond enough of you to work for pizza) put together a site for you, if you don’t already have one.

Finished brainstorming your way through all of these points? Terrific. Now go through your list and cull the less impressive points. Ideally, you will want to end up with somewhere between 3 and 10, enough to fit comfortably as bullet points on a double-spaced page.

Then reduce each point to a single sentence. Yes, this is a pain for those of us who spend our lives meticulously crafting beautiful paragraphs, but trust me, when you are consulting a list in a hurry, simpler is better.

When your list is finished, label it MARKETING POINTS, and keep it by your side until your first book signing. Heck, you might even want to have it handy when you’re giving interviews about your book, because once you’ve come up with a great list of reasons that your book should sell, you’re going to want to bring those reasons up every time you talk about the book, right?

Oh, and keep a copy handy to your writing space. It’s a great pick-me-up for when you start to ask yourself, “Now, why I am I putting in all of this work?”

Tomorrow — drumroll, please! — I shall move on to those magic words that summarize your book. Be prepared to get pithy, everybody. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Hello, Sunday readers:
On Friday, I mentioned in passing that it is quite common for those new to pitching to fall prey to an impulse to tell the agent or editor all about the difficulties the book has met so far on the road to publication. While the impulse is certainly understandable, to the pros, such a litany tends to make the book seem, at best, less marketable than it would have seemed without such a recital.

Since I glossed over this topic so quickly (and since I generally like to take Sundays off from blogging), I am re-running a post I wrote back in March on the subject, during my series on industry etiquette. I suspect some of you will find it helpful.

Actually, those of you who are about to attend your first conference might want to check out the rest of the posts in the INDUSTRY ETIQUETTE category (see list at right). The manners expected of an aspiring writer at such events are not always intuitively apparent.

Enjoy! More practical advice on marketing follows tomorrow.

Yesterday, I switched gears a little in my ongoing series on common faux pas writers inadvertently commit, infractions of industry etiquette the eager often stumble into without realizing. I had intended, from here on out, to talk about only what you should do, rather than what you shouldn’t. However, since conference season is coming up, with its concomitant pitching opportunities, I thought it would be a good idea to follow Norbert’s example from yesterday with another unfortunately pervasive conference misstep.

This next example is the one that most consistently breaks my heart, because it is almost always merely a side effect of the nervousness most writers feel the first few times they pitch their work — and, as such, seems to me disproportionately frowned-upon in the industry. This is the one that prompted me to establish the Pitch Practicing Palace, actually, because so very many first-time pitchers do it. Case in point.

Misguided approach 2: Olive has been querying her excellent first novel unsuccessfully for some years. Having read that it is easier to make contact with an agent at a literary conference than through cold querying (which is quite true, generally speaking), she plunks down a significant amount of cash to attend a major regional conference.

Once there, however, she becomes intimidated by both the enormity of pitching her beloved novel to a powerful stranger and the sheer number of confident-seeming writers around her, all geared up to pitch successfully. Since she knows no one there, she does not have an opportunity to talk through her fears before her appointment; she walks into her pitch meeting with agent Osprey shaking visibly.

Osprey is a nice enough guy to see that she is nervous, so he does his best not to be any more intimidating than their relative positions dictate. He shakes Olive’s hand, offers her a seat, and asks, not unreasonably, “So, what is your book about?”

His kindness is the last blow to her already tenuous composure. Staring down at the tabletop between her and the agent of her dreams, Olive is horrified to hear herself begin to babble not about the book, but about how difficult it has been to try to find a home for it. About her years of querying. About her frantic total revisions of the book after every 20th rejection or so. About how she has gotten to the submission stage a few times, but was never given any reason why her book was rejected – so when she sat down to revise again, she was doing it essentially in the dark.

She has become, in fact, the complete anti-salesperson for her book. Every so often, Osprey tries to steer her back toward the book’s content and why it would appeal to her target audience, but by now, it feels so good to talk to someone, anyone, in the industry about how hard it’s been for her that she just can’t stop. Her every third sentence seems to begin, “Well, you probably wouldn’t be interested, because…”

After awhile, Osprey stops asking questions, letting her ramble. When she finally works up nerve to glance up at his face, her throat contracts: his eyes are distinctly glazed over, as though he were thinking about something else. At that point, all Olive wants to do is run away.

“So,” Osprey says, making a note on a paper before him behind a defensive arm. “What is your book actually about?”

This situation is so sad that I hesitate to ask this, but what did Olive do wrong? Not from a writer’s point of view, but from Osprey’s?

From a writer’s POV, of course, her problem was lack of confidence that led Olive to go off on a tangent unrelated to her pitch, right? But Osprey is an agent well used to dealing with nervous pitchers: her fear alone would not necessarily have put him off.

Her real mistake was telling him – indirectly, of course – that she would be hard to help.

How? By not telling him what the book was. What book category, at what target market it aimed, who the characters are, what the premise is. What the book is ABOUT. Essentially, by airing her fears of rejection at such great length, Olive turned the pitch meeting into a guessing game for Osprey.

Translation: she made it clear to Osprey that if he wanted to hear about her book project – which is, ostensibly, the primary reason they are having this conversation at all – he was going to have to invest quite a bit of energy in drawing the book out of her. Sad but true. Even sadder, Osprey never got an opportunity to hear about Olive’s book, which is actually very well written.

(Omniscient narrators know hidden facts like this, you see.)

Try not to judge Olive too harshly – she fell into a very common panic spiral. It may seem odd to those of you who have never pitched your work verbally, but in the moment, it’s amazingly common for pitchers to take five or ten minutes to calm down before they are able to talk about the book at all. This is why every conference guide ever printed will tell you to prepare your pitch in advance: so you actually talk about the book.

Advance preparation can substantially reduce the probability of falling into a panic spiral – or into the other form Olive’s faux pas often takes (I am re-using Olive here, to give her a happier lifepath):

Misguided approach 3: Olive has brought her excellent novel to pitch to agent Osprey. He shakes her hand, offers her a seat, and asks, “So,” he checks his schedule here, “Olive, tell me what your book is about?”

Delighted by his interest, Olive tells him her title, then proceeds to tell him the entire plot of the book, beginning on page 1. Ten minutes later, she has reached the end of Chapter 4.

Osprey looks shell-shocked, but that might just be effects of the day’s cumulative pitch fatigue. “Um, that sounds very interesting,” he says, standing to lead her back to the appointment desk, “but a trifle complicated for us.”

This version of Olive reached the same result – convincing Osprey that she would be hard to help – by completely opposite means. By presenting a kitchen-sink pitch, replicating the entire storyline rather than concentrating on the primary themes of the book, Olive told Osprey – again, indirectly – that he would need to put in a lot of effort to make her work market-worthy.

In other words, by prepping your pitch in advance (and don’t worry; I’ll do a nice, juicy series on how to do that between now and conference season), you are telling the agent to whom you pitch, “Here I am, making it as easy as humanly possible to help me. I am more than prepared to meet you halfway, and together, let’s walk the path to publication.”

Sort of disorienting, isn’t it, to think of it that way? Give some thought to how you can present yourself as easy for an agent to help, and keep up the good work!

Yesterday, I suggested that a dandy way to prepare for a conversation with a real, live agent or editor was to sit down and come up with a list of selling points for your book.

Not just vague assertions about why an editor at a publishing house would find it an excellent example of its species of book — that much is assumed, right? — but reasons that an actual real-world book customer might want to pull that book from a shelf at Barnes & Noble and carry it up to the cash register.

By the time I finished suggesting a first set of possibilities, I could practically hear some of you, particularly novelists, tapping your feet impatiently. “Um, Anne?” some of you seemed to be saying, with a nervous glance at your calendars, “I can understand why this might be a useful document for querying by letter, or for sending along with my submission, but have you forgotten that I will be giving VERBAL pitches at a conference just a few weeks away? Is this really the best time to be spending hours coming up with my book’s selling points?”

My readers are so smart; you always ask the right questions at precisely the right time. Before you pitch is EXACTLY when you should devote some serious thought to your book’s selling points. I am going through a long list of potential categories in order that everyone would be able to recognize at least a couple of possibilities.

Because, you see, if your book has market appeal over and above its writing style (and the vast majority of books do), YOU SHOULD MENTION IT IN YOUR PITCH. Not in a general, “well, I think a lot of readers will like it,” sort of way, but by citing specific, fact-based REASONS that they will clamor to read it. Preferably backed by verifiable statistics.

Why? Because it will make you look professional in the eyes of the agent or editor sitting in front of you. And because, really, no agent is going to ask to see a manuscript purely because its author says it is well-written, any more than our old pal Millicent the screener would respond to a query that mentioned the author’s mother thought the book was the best thing she had ever read with a phone call demanding that the author overnight the whole thing to her.

“Good enough for Mom? Then it’s good enough for me!” is not, alas, a common sentiment in the industry.

I concentrated on the standard writing résumé bullet points yesterday, but try not to get too bogged down in listing the standard prestige points, though. Naturally, you should include any previous publications and/or writing degrees on your list of selling points, but if you have few or no previous publications, awards, and writing degrees to your credit, do not despair.

(5) Relevant life experience. This is well worth including, if it helped fill in some important background for the book. Is your novel about coal miners based upon your twenty years of experience in the coalmining industry? Is your protagonist’s kid sister’s horrifying trauma at a teen beauty pageant based loosely upon your years as Miss Junior Succotash? Mention it.

What you should NOT do, however, is stammer out in a pitch meeting (or say in a query letter) that your novel is “sort of autobiographical.” To an agent or editor, this can translate as, “This book is a memoir with the names changed. Since it is based upon true events, I will be totally unwilling to revise it to your specifications.”

The distinction I am drawing here is a subtle one, admittedly. Having the background experience to write credibly about a particular situation is a legitimate selling point: in interviews, you will be able to speak at length about the real-life situation.

However, industry professionals simply assume that fiction writers draw upon their own backgrounds for material. But to them, a book that recounts true events in its author’s life is a memoir, not a novel. Contrary to the pervasive movie-of-the-week philosophy, the mere fact that a story is true does not make it more appealing; it merely means potential legal problems.

Translation: until folks in the industry have forgotten about the A MILLION LITTLE PIECES fiasco, it’s not going to be a good idea to include the fact that a novel is semi-autobiographical in your pitch.

(6) Associations and affiliations. If you are writing on a topic that is of interest to some national organization, bring it up here. Also, if you are a member of a group willing to promote (or review) your work, mention it.

Some possible examples: the Harpo Marx Fan Club has 120, 000 members in the U.S. alone, as well as a monthly newsletter, guaranteeing substantial speaking engagement interest; Angelina Jolie is a well-known graduate of Yale University, which guarantees a mention of her book on tulip cultivation in the alumni newsletter. Currently, the Yale News reaches over 28 million readers bimonthly.

(Perhaps it goes without mentioning, but I pulled all of the examples I am using here out of thin air. Probably not the best idea to quote me on any of ‘em.)

(7) Trends and recent bestsellers. If there is a marketing, popular, or research trend that touches on the subject matter of your book, state it here. If there has been a recent upsurge in sales of books on your topic, or a television show devoted to it, mention it. (Recent, in industry terms, means within the last five years.)

Even if these trends support a secondary subject in your book, they are still worth including. If you can back your assertion with legitimate numbers (see this week’s earlier posts on the joys of statistics), all the better.

Some possible examples: novels featuring divorced mothers of small children have enjoyed a considerable upswing in popularity in recent years. A July, 2006 search on Amazon.com revealed over 1,200 titles; ferret ownership has risen 28% in the last five years, according to the National Rodent-Handlers Association; last year’s major bestseller, THAT HORRIBLE GUMBY by Pokey, sold over 97 million copies. It is reasonable to expect that its readers will be anxious to read Gumby’s reply.

(8) Statistics. At risk of repeating myself, if you are writing about a condition affecting human beings, there are almost certainly statistics available about how many people in the country are affected by it. By listing the real statistics here, you minimize the probability of the agent or editor’s guess being far too low. Get your information from the most credible sources possible, and cite them.

Some possible examples: 400,000 Americans are diagnosed annually with Inappropriate Giggling Syndrome, creating a large audience potentially eager for this book; according to a recent study in the TORONTO STAR, 90% of Canadians have receding hairlines — pointing to an immense potential Canadian market for this book.

I’m going to leave off here for today, to give you some time to ponder the possibilities, and resume my list next time. Yes, generating selling points IS a lot of work, but believe me, in retrospect, you will be glad to have a few of these reasons written down before you meet with — or query — the agent of your dreams.

Trust me on this one. Remember me kindly when, down the line, your agent or editor raves about how prepared you were to market your work. And, as always, keep up the good work!

As we head into the final days of prep before my local Conference That Shall Not Be Named*. I have a fun-but-practical topic for today: what materials should you bring with you to a conference — and, more importantly, to your agent and editor meetings?

Other than good, strong nerves and faith that your book is the best literary achievement since Madame Bovary, of course.

At minimum, you’re going to want a trusty, comfortable pen and notebook with a backing hard enough to write upon, to take good notes. Also, it’s a good idea to bring a shoulder bag sturdy enough to hold all of the handouts you will accumulate and books you will buy at the conference.

This is not an occasion for a flimsy purse — don’t underestimate how many books you may acquire. It’s rare that a literary conference doesn’t have a room devoted to convincing you to buy the collected works of conference speakers, local writers, and the folks who organized the conference. (At the Conference That Shall Not Be Named, for instance, only organization members and conference presenters’ work will be featured.)

Don’t expect any discounts — for some reason, offering a writers’ discount never seems to occur to organizers — but it’s usually child’s play to get ‘em signed. Do be aware, though, that when major bookstore chains organize these rooms (and at large conferences, it’s often a chain like Barnes & Noble), they often take an additional payment off the top, so a self-published author may well make less per book in such a venue.

This is not to say that you should hesitate to purchase a book from the writer with whom you’ve been chatting in the book room for the last half an hour. You should. However, if the book is self-published, you might want to ask the author if s/he would prefer for you to buy it elsewhere.

But I digress. Back to the contents of your conference bag.

In addition to my notebook, I always like to include a few sheets of blank printer paper in my bag, so I can draw a diagram of the agents’ forum, and another of the editors’, to keep track of who was sitting where and note a few physical characteristics, along with their expressed preferences in books.

Why do I do this? Well, these fora are typically scheduled at the very beginning of the first day of the conference — a very, very long day.

By the time people are wandering into their appointments at the end of the second day, dehydrated from convention hall air and overwhelmed with masses of professional information, I’ve found that they’re often too tired to recall WHICH editor had struck them the day before as someone with whom to try to finagle a last-minute appointment. Being able to whip out the diagrams has jogged many a memory, including mine.

And by the way, at a conference that offers an agents’ or editors’ panel (and most do), do not even CONSIDER missing it. Attendees are expected to listen to what the agents and editors are seeking at the moment and — brace yourself for this — it does not always match what was said in the conference guide blurb.

There was a reason that I used to post the recent sales of agents and editors scheduled to attend the Conference That Shall Not Be Named: tastes change. So does the market. But blurbs tend to hang around from year to year.

No comment — except to say that you will be a much, much happier camper if you keep an ear cocked during the agents’ and editors’ fora to double-check that the agent to whom you were planning to pitch a vampire romance isn’t going around saying, “Heavens, if I see ONE more vampire romance…”

I always, always, ALWAYS bring bottled water to conferences — even to ones where the organizers tend to be very good about keeping water available. A screw-top bottle in your bag can save both spillage and inconvenience for your neighbors.

How? Well, when you’re wedged into the middle of a row of eager note-takers in a classroom, it’s not always the easiest thing in the world to make your way to the table with the pitcher on it, nor to step over people with a full glass in your hand.

If I seem to be harping on the dehydration theme, there’s a good reason: every indoor conference I have ever attended has dried out my contact lenses, and personally, I prefer to meet people when my lenses are not opaque with grime.

I’m wacky that way. If your eyes dry out easily, consider wearing your glasses instead.

Even if you have perfect vision, there’s a good reason to keep on sippin’. If you are even VAGUELY prone to nerves — and who isn’t, in preparing to pitch? — being dehydrated can add substantially to your sense of being slightly off-kilter. You want to be at your best. Lip balm can be helpful in this respect, too.

Both conferences and hotels, like airports, see a lot of foot traffic, so the week leading up to the conference is NOT the time to skip the vitamins. I go one step further: at the conference, I dump packets of Emergen-C into my water bottle, to keep my immune system strong.

If this seems like frou-frou advice, buttonhole me at a conference sometime, and I’ll regale you with stories about nervous pitchers who have passed out in front of agents. Don’t lock your knees, don’t drink too much coffee or alcohol, and if you need to sit down, say so right away. A conference should not be an endurance test.

Trust me, this is a time to be VERY good to yourself. If I had my way, the hallways at any pitching conference would be lined with massage chairs, to reduce people’s stress.

While I’m sounding like your mother, I shall add: don’t try to pitch on an empty stomach. No matter how nervous you are, try to eat something an hour or so before your pitch appointment. If you are anticipating doing a lot of hallway pitching, or dislike the type of rubber chicken and reheated pasta that tends to turn up on conference buffets, you might want to conceal a few munchies in your bag, to keep yourself fueled up.

Since you will most likely be sitting on folding chairs for many, many hours over the course of the conference, you might want to bring a small pillow. I once attended a conference where instead of tote bags, the organizers distributed portable seat cushions emblazoned with the writers’ organization’s logo, and you should have heard the public rejoicing.

In the spirit of serious frivolity, I’m going to make another suggestion: carry something silly in your bag, a good-luck charm or something that will make you smile. It can work wonders when you’re stressed, to have a concealed secret. I used to advise my university students to wear their strangest underwear on final exam day, for that reason — it allowed them to know something that no one else in the room knew.

(It also meant several years of students walking up to me when they turned in their bluebooks and telling me precisely what they were wearing under those athletic department sweats — and, on one memorable occasion, showing me à la Monica Lewinsky. Allegedly.

Trust me: resist the urge to share; it’s disconcerting to onlookers.)

If you suspect you would be uncomfortable wearing your 20-year-old Underroos or leather garter belt (sorry; you’re going to have to find your own link to that) under your conference attire, a teddy bear in your bag can serve much the same purpose.

That’s such an interesting image that I believe I shall leave you for today to ponder it. Tomorrow, I shall talk a bit about marketing tools you might want to have in your bag, and for the rest of this week, I shall be wrapping up the last loose ends of conference lore, before moving on to how to apply the skills we learned in Book Marketing 101 to query letters and submissions.

A full summer, but a fruitful one, my friends. Keep up the good work!

*If this reference to a conference that may or may not be being held next weekend seems mysterious to you, or if you’re wondering why I’m not doing a Pitch Practicing Palace this year, please see my post for April 14.

Woo hoo: now we’re up to five regular blog readers who made the PNWA finals — an entire handful! Congratulations to all! Our good thoughts go with you in this final round.

And a hearty hurrah as well to all of you who had the gumption to enter this or any other contest this year! It takes a lot of courage to put your work out there for that level of hyper-scrutiny; it also takes quite a bit of time to prepare an entry well, time you chose to expend trying to add to your writing résumé. Regardless of the outcome, that was a brave effort toward enhancing your professional credentials, and I’m proud of you.

Last time, I urged you to think about your target reader — and why that reader really wants to read your book, rather than any other book currently on the market. Not only is this useful information to include in your pitch (yes, yes, we’re getting to it) and query letter, but it ALWAYS pays to be prepared in as many ways as possible for questions you may be asked about your book’s market potential.

Remember, your task in preparing to pitch is not to compress the plot into a single breath’s worth of sentences, to be gasped out as quickly as possible before you fall in a dead faint at the agent’s feet: it’s to be able to present your work intelligently and professionally in a variety of promotional contexts.

“Who is your target audience?” is not, after all, an unreasonable question to ask about a book.

Yesterday, I suggested in passing that one good way to identify your book’s target market is to seek out how many people are already demonstrably interested in the book’s subject matter. Not the good folks who are already out there buying novels like yours, bless ’em, but potential readers with an interest in some aspect of the story you are telling.

What do I mean? Well, in even the most personal literary fiction, even the most intimate memoir is about something other than the writing in the book, right? A sensitive novel about a professional mah-jongg player who falls in love with a bricklayer she meets in her Morris dancing class is arguably not only going to be of interest to inveterate readers of women’s fiction; potentially, those who already participate in mah-jongg, bricklaying, and Morris dancing might well find your book fascinating.

If you doubt that such interests translate into book sales, take a gander at how many books only marginally related to golf there are: quite a few, probably disproportionate to the percentage of the reading population who actually plays the game. But think about Christmas and Father’s day: these books answer the perennial question, “What do you give the golfer who has everything BUT a thriller about a 5 iron-wielding maniac?”

These people are as legitimately your book’s target market as readers who regularly buy books in your chosen category. Declare them as such. It’s not enough just to tell agents and editors that these additional demographics exist, however. For this information to help you market your book, you’re going to have to get specific.

To go back to yesterday’s example, let’s say you’ve written a charming novel about Tina, a Gen X woman who finds herself reliving the trauma of her parents’ divorce when she was 12. As the better-prepared incarnations of Suzette informed us yesterday (you had to be there), there are 47 Gen Xers currently living in the U.S., roughly half of whom have divorced parents. And half of them are, like Tina, female.

So without reaching at all, Suzette could safely say that almost 12 million Americans already have life experience that would incline them to identify with Tina. That’s a heck of a lot more persuasive, from an agent’s point of view, than merely pointing out that daughters of divorced parents might conceivably find resonance in Suzette’s book.

Nor need Suzette limit herself to the demographic closest to her protagonist’s; she could consider the vocations and avocations of minor characters as well. If Tina’s father is a collector of classic cars, do you think he’s the only one in the country? If her best friend has a child with Down syndrome, wouldn’t your book be interesting to parents dealing with similar issues?

And given that one of the greatest gifts the internet has bestowed upon us all is the ability to create interest-based communities amongst far-flung people, what’s the probability that a simple web search will turn up a support group or an article containing statistics about just how many of these fine people are currently navigating their way across the earth’s crust?

“Whoa!” I hear some of you cry indignantly. “Who do I look like, George Gallup? Wouldn’t any agent or editor who specializes in a book like mine have a substantially better idea of the existing market than I ever could — and what’s more, infinitely greater practical means of finding out the relevant statistics? Do I have to do ALL of the agent’s job for him? When will this nightmare end, oh Lord, when will it end?”

You’re beautiful when you get angry. Especially, as in this case, when annoyance stems from a very real change in the publishing industry: even ten years ago, no one, but no one, would have expected a fiction writer to be able to produce relevant potential target market statistics for her book. (It’s always been standard for NF book proposals.)

And even now, you could probably get away with not quoting actual statistics, as long as you are very specific about whom your ideal reader will be. However, if you do, you run the very serious risk of the agent or editor to whom you are pitching underestimating how big your potential market is.

And when I say underestimating, I’m not talking about a merely imprecise ballpark estimate. I’m talking about an extremely busy publishing professional who hears a pitch or reads a query and thinks, “This would be really appealing to readers who’ve recently experienced deaths in their immediate families, but realistically, how many of them could there be in the United States in any given year? Maybe a hundred thousand? That’s a niche market.”

Niche market, incidentally, is the industry’s polite term for any group of people too small to deserve its own shelf in Borders.

But the book described above has millions of readers with direct personal experience of dealing with a loved one’s death. How do I know this? I did some research: in 2004, 8 million people in the US suffered deaths in the immediate family; of those, 400,000 of the survivors were under the age of 25. Before they are old enough to vote, more than 2% of Americans have lost at least one parent. Furthermore, widows and widowers make up 7% of the U.S. population; 45% of women over the age of 65 have been widowed at least once.

If that’s a niche in the book-buying market, I’d hate to see a cave.

How much harm could it possibly do if your dream agent or editor misunderstands the size of your book’s potential audience? Let me let you in on a dirty little industry secret: people in the industry have a very clear idea of what HAS sold in the past, but are not always very accurate predictors about what WILL sell in the future. THE FIRST WIVES’ CLUB floated around forever before it found a home, for instance, as, I’m told, did COLD MOUNTAIN. And let’s not even begin to talk about BRIDGET JONES.

In fact, five of the ten best-selling books of the twentieth century were initially refused by more than a dozen publishers who simply did not understand their market appeal — and refused to take a chance on a first-time author. Get a load of what got turned down as appealing to only a niche market:

Richard Hooker’s M*A*S*H — rejected by 21 publishing houses. {“How many Army doctors could there possibly be?” they must have scoffed.)

Thor Heyerdahl’s KON-TIKI — rejected by 20 publishing houses. (Yes, THAT Kon-Tiki. Probable editorial reasoning: “This might appeal to people who sail for pleasure, but can we afford a novel for the yacht market?”)

Dr. Seuss’ first book, AND TO THINK THAT I SAW IT ON MULBERRY STREET — rejected by 23 publishing houses. (“Do we really want to confuse children?”)

Richard Bach’s JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL — rejected by 18 publishing houses. (“The only person I have ever known who cared about seagulls was my mad great-aunt Kate, who spent her last years wandering down to the beach to offer them caviar on crackers.”)

Patrick Dennis’ AUNTIE MAME — rejected by 17 publishing houses. (I have no idea what they were thinking here; sorry.)

To render these rejections more impressive, these first books were passed upon back when it was significantly easier to get published than it is now. Back then, the major publishing houses were still willing to read unagented work; it was before the computer explosion multiplied submissions exponentially, and before the array of major publishing houses consolidated into just a few.

With this much editorial rejection, can you imagine how difficult it would have been for any of these books to find an agent today, let alone a publisher?

And yet can you even picture the publishing world without any of them? Aren’t you glad they didn’t listen to the prevailing wisdom?

And don’t you wish that Richard Hooker had taken a few moments to verify the number of Korean War veterans (or veterans of any foreign war, or doctors who have served in war zones, or…) BEFORE he composed his first query letter?

The internet is a tremendous resource for finding such statistics, although do double-check the sources of statistics you find there — not all of the information floating around the web is credible.

How can you verify the numbers? Call the main branch of public library in the big city closest to you, and ask to speak to the reference librarian. (In Seattle, the Quick Information Line number is 206-386-4636, and the staff is amazing. Send them flowers.) They may not always be able to find the particular fact you are seeking, but they can pretty much invariably steer you in the right direction.

One caveat about information line etiquette: every time I have ever given this advice in a class, at least one writer has come stomping back to me. “I called and asked,” these earnest souls will cry indignantly, “but they said they couldn’t help me.” When prodded, they all turn out to have made the same mistake: they called up an information line and said something on the order of, “I am marketing a YA novel about a serial killer. What statistics can you give me?”

Naturally, the info line folks demurred; it’s not their job, after all, to come up with marketing insights for aspiring writers’ books. What their job does render them eminently qualified to do, on the other hand, is to answer questions like, “Can you tell me, please, how many US high schools offer gun safety classes? And how many students take these classes each year?”

The moral: make your questions as specific as possible, and don’t ask more than three in any given call. (You can always call back tomorrow, right?)

And please, don’t waste their time by telling them why you want to know, or you’re likely to end up with statistics about how many first novels on coal-mining beauty queens were sold within the last five years. Keep it short and to the point.

Tomorrow, I shall move on to another building block of a great pitch: identifying your book’s selling points. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Hoo, boy, campers, this is getting exciting: so far, members of our little community here have racked up FOUR finalist spots in the PNWA literary contest. (Any more out there?) And, gratifyingly for my rooting prospects, they are all in different categories. So I can say without fear of bias: best of luck to all!

By this point in my crash course in prepping yourself to pitch and/or query, you should have in hand a vital first building block: your book’s category. This handy tool will not only feature prominently in your pitch, but also on the title page of your manuscript and in the first few lines of your query letter.

(If it’s news to you that your title page should include these elements — or if it’s news to you that your manuscript should include a title page at all — please see the YOUR TITLE PAGE category at right.)

Today, I shall be moving on to a more sophisticated marketing tool, one that is not technically required, but will instantly stamp your pitch/query as more professional. I refer, of course, to a concise, well-considered statement of your book’s target market, including an estimate of how many potential buyers are in that demographic group.

And yes, Virginia, that can mean talking — dare I say it? — statistics. Intimidating news to those of us who vastly preferred the verbal section of the SAT to the math. (Actually, I was always good at math, but I suppose my high school calculus teacher didn’t nickname me Liberal Arts Annie for nothing.)

But I’m not talking about general publishing statistics here; any agent or editor would have access to more up-to-date information on that front than we would. There’s no reason for you to track down how many books sold in your chosen category last year, for instance. It makes far more sense to discover how many people there are who have already demonstrated interest in your book’s specific subject matter.

But before I talk about how one goes about doing that, let’s discuss what a target market is. Simply put, the target market for a book is the group of people most likely to buy it. It is the demographic (or the demographics) toward which your publisher will be gearing advertising.

I know these are not the first questions we writers like to ask ourselves, but if you pictured your ideal reader, who would it be? To put it more generally, who is going to want to read your book, and why?

Do I hear some disgruntled muttering out there? “I’m not a marketer; I’m a writer,” I hear some of you say. “How the heck should I know who is going to buy my book? And anyway, shouldn’t a well-written book be its own justification to anyone but a money-grubbing philistine?”

Well, yes, in a perfect world, or one without a competitive market. But neither is, alas, the world in which we currently live. As nice as it would be if readers flocked to buy our books simply because we had invested a whole lot of time in writing them, no potential book buyer is interested in EVERY book on the market, right? There are enough beautifully-written books out there that most readers expect to be offered something else as well: an exciting plot, for instance, or information about an interesting phenomenon.

In other words, to pitch or query your book successfully, you’re going to need to be able to make it look to the philistines like a good horse to back.

And before anybody out there gets huffy about how the industry really ought to publish gorgeously-written books for art’s sake, rather than books that are likely to appeal to a particular demographic, think about what that would mean from the editor’s POV: if she can realistically bring 4 books to press in the next year (not an unusually low per-editor number), how many of them can be serious marketing risks, without placing herself in danger of losing her job?

It’s very much worth your while to give some thought to your target readership BEFORE you pitch or query, so you may point it out to that nervous editor or market-anxious agent. So try to think about it not as criticism of your book, but as a legitimate marketing question: who is going to read your book, and why?

To put it charitably, the vast majority of fiction writers do not think very much about the demographics of their potential readers — which is to say, most don’t seem to consider the question at all. (A luxury, I might point out, that NF writers do not have: NF book proposals invariably have an entire section on target audience.)

Or when they do, they identify their readership in the broadest possible terms: “All readers will find this of interest” is an astonishingly common claim. If I had a dime for every time I have seen, “This book will appeal to every woman in America!” I would own my own publishing house — and the island upon which it stood, the fleet of sailboats to transport books from there to market, and a small navy’s worth of shark-wranglers to keep my employees’ limbs safe while they paddled between editing projects.

Why do sweeping generalizations tend to be ineffectual? Well, agents and editors do have quite a bit of practical experience with book marketing: they know for a fact that no single book will appeal to EVERY woman in America. Since they hear such claims so often, after awhile, they just block out all hyperbole.

Coming from authors, that is. Anyone who has ever read a marketing blurb knows that they’re not shy about using hyperbole themselves.

Make sure your claims are believable — and use your imagination. Is your ideal reader a college-educated woman in her thirties or forties? Is it a girl aged 10-13 who doesn’t quite fit in with her classmates? Is it an office worker who likes easy-to-follow plots to peruse while he’s running on the treadmill? Is it a working grandmother who fears she will never be able to afford to retire? Is it a commuter who reads on the bus for a couple of hours a day, seeking an escape from a dull, dead-end job?

While these may sound narrow definitions, each actually represents a very large group of people, and a group that buys a heck of a lot of books. Give some thought to who they are, and what they will get out of your book.

Or, to put a smilier face upon it, how will this reader’s life be improved by reading this particular book, as opposed to any other? Why will the book speak to him?

Be as specific as you can. As with book category, if you explain in nebulous terms who you expect to read your book, you will simply not be speaking the language of agents and editors. Their sales and marketing departments expect them to be able to speak in numbers — and no matter how much the editors at a publishing house love any given book, they’re unlikely to make an actual offer for it unless the sales and marketing folks are pretty enthused about it, too.

Let me give you a concrete example of what can happens if you are vague. Aspiring writer Suzette has written a charming novel about an American woman in her late thirties who finds herself reliving the trauma of her parents’ divorce when she was 12. Since the book is set in the present day, that makes her protagonist a Gen Xer, as Suzette herself is. Let’s further assume that like the vast majority of pitchers, she has not thought about her target market before walking into her appointment with agent Briana.

So she’s stunned when Briana, says that there’s no market for such a book. But being a bright person, quick on her feet, Suzette comes up with a plausible response: “I’m the target market for this book,” she says. “People like me.”

Now, that’s actually a pretty good answer — readers are often drawn to the work of writers like themselves — but it is vague. What Suzette really meant was, “My target readership is women born between 1964 and 1975, half of whom have divorced parents. Just under 12 million Americans, in other words — and that’s just for starters.”

But Briana heard what Suzette SAID, not what she meant. The result was that Briana thought: “Oh, God, another book for aspiring writers.” (People like the author, right?) “What does this writer think my agency is, a charitable organization? I’d like to be able to retire someday.”

And what would an editor at a major publishing house (let’s call him Ted) conclude from Suzette’s statement? Something, no doubt, along the lines of, “This writer is writing for her friends. All four of them. Next!”

Being vague about her target audience has not served Suzette’s interests, clearly. Let’s take a peek at what would have happened if she had been a trifle more specific, shall we?

Suzette says: “Yes, there is a target market for my book: Gen Xers, half of whom are women, many of whom have divorced parents.”

Agent Briana thinks: “Hmm, that’s a substantial niche market. 5 million, maybe?”

But when Briana pitches it to editor Ted this way, he thinks: “Great, a book for people who aren’t Baby Boomers. Most of the population is made up of Baby Boomers and their children. Do I really want to publish a book for a niche market of vegans with little disposable income?”

So a little better, but no cigar. Let’s take a look at what happens if Suzette has thought through her readership in advance, and walks into her pitch meetings with Briana and Ted with her statistics all ready to leap off her tongue.

Suzette says (immediately after describing the book): “I’m excited about this project, because I think my protagonist’s divorce trauma will really resonate with the 47 million Gen Xers currently living in the United States. Half of these potential readers have parents who have divorced at least once in their lifetimes. Literally everybody in that age group either had divorces within their own families as kids or had close friends that did. I think this book will strike a chord with these people.”

Agent Briana responds: “There are 47 million Gen Xers? I had no idea there were that many. Let’s talk about your book further over coffee.”

And editor Ted thinks: “47 million! Even if the book actually appealed to only 1% of them, it’s still a market well worth pursuing.”

As scary as it may be to think about, if you are going to make a living as a writer, you will be writing for a public. In order to convince people in the publishing industry that yours is the voice that public wants and needs to hear, you will need to figure out who those people are, and why they will be drawn toward your book.

If you don’t want to make a living at it, of course, you needn’t worry about marketing realities; writing for your own pleasure, and that of your kith and kin, is a laudable pursuit. But if you want total strangers to buy your work, you are going to have to think about marketing it to them.

As I have said before, and shall no doubt say many times again: art for art’s sake is marvelous, but an author’s being cognizant of the realities of the market renders it far more likely that her book is going to be successful.

Tomorrow, I shall talk about how to dig up specifics about your target demographic relatively painlessly. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Yesterday, I broke the unhappy news that each and every one of you who ever plans to pitch to an agent or editor at a conference (or write an effective query letter) needs to pick a conceptual box into which to load your book. In other words, you need to pick a book category — and only ONE book category, please — for your book.

Since I could feel some of you cringe the moment I suggested this yesterday, let’s do a little meditation to help you acclimate yourself to this new reality, shall we? Everybody ready? Okay, picture me in your mind as your fairy godmother, wings and all. Perhaps a little something like this:

Got it? Good. Now picture me lifting my spangled wand high and dusting you with fairy dust. Poof! You are now no longer capable of being wishy-washy about your book category.

Now you will speak — and even think — of your book as a marketable product, as agents and editors do. You have been magically forever deprived of the unprofessional desire to describe your book as, “sort of a cross between a high-end thriller and a romantic comedy, with Western elements” or “Have you ever seen the TV show HOUSE? Well, it’s sort of like that, except set in a prison in Southeast Asia in the Middle Ages!”

Trust me, when you are sitting in a pitch meeting, you will thank me for disconnecting your ambivalence wires. This is simply not an industry where vagueness pays off.

While I was at it, I also knocked out of your vocabulary a few choice phrases that tend to make agents and editors cringe:

“Fiction novel” (by definition, all novels are fiction.)
“A true memoir” (by definition, all memoirs are based upon fact. As are all nonfiction books.)
“…but it is written like literary fiction.” (Perhaps true, but not a substitute for a category description; more on this thorny issue in my next post.)

Actually, if you write anything BUT literary fiction, the kindest thing your fairy godmother could possibly have done for you is prevent you from EVER saying it to an agent, editor, publicist, interviewer, or even the guy next to you on the bus at any point in the next fifty years. Why? Well, on a practical level, literary fiction represents only a tiny fraction of the domestic fiction market; not very many agents represent it, for that reason.

But there’s a better, more philosophical reason as well: because if you write in a genre, you should be PROUD of the fact, not apologetic.

Writers often do not realize it, but hedging about the writing in a book does indeed come across as apologetic to professional ears. Think about it: is someone who has devoted her life to the promotion of science fiction and fantasy going to THANK you for indirectly casting aspersions on the writing typical of that genre?

It is also a turn-off, professionally speaking, a signal that the writer might not be very well versed in the genre. Why, the average agent will think during such a pitch, doesn’t this author write in the language of his chosen genre? Every genre has its handful of conventions; is this writer saying that he’s simply decided to ignore them? Why write in a genre, if you’re not going to write in the genre’s style? And why am I asking myself this string of rhetorical questions, instead of listening to the pitch this writer is giving?

See the problem?

There is an unfortunately pervasive rumor on the writers’ conference circuit that a genre label automatically translates in professional minds into writing less polished than other fiction. No, no, no: genre distinctions, as they are reflected in book categories, are indicators of where a book will sit in a bookstore. They’re NOT value judgments; they’re ways to divide up the industry.

At the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, NO agent represents EVERY kind of book. They specialize.

And believe me, an agent who is looking for psychological thrillers is far more likely to ask to see your manuscript if you label it PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER than just as FICTION. And an agent interested in psychological thrillers will not even sniff at a book labeled LITERARY FICTION.

Trust me on this one, for your fairy godmother speaks from hard personal experience. I write mainstream fiction and memoir, but I once had the misfortune to be critiqued by an editor who did not handle either: one of those conference assignment snafus I was mentioning the other day.

We could not have had less to say to each other if he had been speaking Urdu and I Swedish, but as those of you who read the previous week’s post already know, I am a great believer in trying to turn conference matching accidents into learning opportunities. So, gritting my teeth like a nice girl, I listened patiently to what he had to say about the first chapter of my novel.

If I had been clutching my magic wand at the time, I would certainly have turned him into a toad.

What he had to say, unsurprisingly, was that while he found the writing excellent, he would advise that I change the protagonist from a woman to a man, strip away most of the supporting characters, and begin the novel with a conflict that occurred two-thirds of the way through the book, the fall of the Soviet Union. “Then,” he said, beaming at me with what I’m sure he thought was avuncular encouragement and not leering sleaziness, “you’ll have a thriller we can market, dear. I’d been happy to take another look at it then.”

Perhaps I had overdone the politeness bit; I hate it when total strangers call me dear. I’m not THAT cute, I tell you. But I kept my mien pleasant. “But it’s not a thriller.”

He could not have looked more appalled if I had suddenly pulled a switchblade on him. “Then why are you talking to me?” he huffed, and hied himself to the bar for what I believe was another double Scotch.

Naturally, I was miffed, but in retrospect, I can certainly understand his annoyance: if I had been even vaguely interested in writing thrillers, his advice would have been manna from heaven, and I should have been grateful for it. I would have fallen all over myself to thank him for his 20-minute discourse about how people who read thrillers (mostly men) dislike female protagonists, particularly ones who (like the protagonist in the book we were discussing) are well educated. The lady with the Ph.D. usually does not live beyond the first act of a thriller, he told me, so yours truly is going to keep her pretty little head sporting its doctoral tam in another genre.

Dear.

I learned something very important from this exchange: specialists in the publishing biz are extremely book-category myopic. To them, books outside their areas of expertise might as well be poorly written; in their minds, no other kinds of books are marketable.

Oh, and just in case you think that I’ve just been being governessy in urging my readers to be as polite as possible to EVERYONE they meet at ANY writers’ conference: that near-sighted editor later became now a high mucky-muck at the publishing house that bought my memoir — which, I can’t resist telling you, covered in part my years teaching in a university.

Chalk one up for the educated girls. But isn’t it lucky that I didn’t smack him in his condescending mouth all those years ago? Or transform him into a toad?

The baseless rumor that genre carries a stigma has led a lot of good writers to pitch manuscripts that would have stood out magnificently within their proper genres as mainstream or even literary fiction, resulting in queries and pitches aimed at the wrong eyes and ears. By labeling your work correctly, you increase the chances of your pitch’s attracting someone who genuinely likes your kind of book astronomically.

So label your work with absolute clarity, and revel in your category affiliation. Think about it: would Luke Skywalker have been able to use the Force effectively in a mainstream romantic comedy? No: the light sabers shine brightest in the science fiction realm.

Being true to your genre will help you resist the temptation to label the book as an unholy hyphenate (“It’s a chick lit thriller!”) in a misguided attempt to represent it as having a broader potential audience.

Trust me on this one: if a subgenre already has a name, there is already a well-documented market out there for it. So don’t be afraid to label your work with a very narrow subgenre label, if it’s appropriate. Yes, it may whittle down the array of agents to whom you can pitch the book at any given conference, but it will definitely make your pitching — and querying — process more efficient.

It’s just common sense, really. There’s a reason that book category is the first thing that appears on a professionally-formatted title page, after all: the more accurately a book is labeled, the more likely it is to catch the eye of an agent or editor who honestly wants to snap up that kind of book. (If you don’t know how to create a professional title page, or were not aware that all submissions to agencies require title pages, please see the YOUR TITLE PAGE category at right.) Hyper-specific category labels are a shortcut that enables them to weed out pitches outside their areas almost instantly.

And that, in case you were wondering, is why agents like to be told the category in the first paragraph of the query letter. (You knew to do that, right?) It saves them scads of time if you tell them instantly whether your book is a hardboiled mystery or a caper mystery: if it isn’t the variety they are looking for today, they can reject it immediately, without investing all that time in reading.

And that, boys and girls, is why pitchers who are wishy-washy about their books’ categories annoy them. Being vague may seem as though it is going to please all of the people all of the time, but in practice, it’s more likely to generate ire than good will.

Trust me, you’ll be better off if an agent who doesn’t like your kind of work remains nursing his Scotch in the bar. Clearly identifying your book category can help YOU weed HIM out, rather than the other way around.

Next time, I shall deal with the two book categories that are most often misdefined: literary and women’s fiction. In the meantime, may the Force be with you, my friends, and also with your books. Keep up the good work!

Okay, let’s assume that you’ve finished the basic writing and paperwork for your contest entry. You’ve read and reread your chapter, and it is both grammatically impeccable and one hell of a good story; Will Rogers, Mark Twain, and Dorothy Parker would all gnash their venerable teeth, if they still had them, in envy over your storytelling skills. Now it’s time to start asking yourself a few questions, to weed out the more subtle problems that can make the difference between making the finalist list and being an also-ran:

(1) Is my entry AND the length specified by the contest rules? Is it double-spaced, in 12-point type, with standard margins?

Yes, I know — I’ve mentioned all this already. I’ve also seen a whole lot of contest entries in odd formats, or with standard format in the chapters and single-spaced synopses. Unless the rules specifically state otherwise, keep EVERYTHING you submit in standard format.

(2) Is every page numbered? Does every page (except the title page, or as specified by the rules) contain the slug line TITLE/#?

Oh, how I wish I had a dime for every unnumbered manuscript page I have ever read… An astonishingly high percentage of writers leave this vital step until the last minute — and apparently forget in the rush of getting the entry into the mail by the deadline.

(3) Does the first page of the synopsis SAY that it’s a synopsis? Does it also list the title of the book? And does every page of the synopsis contain the slug line TITLE/SYNOPSIS/#?

Again, this is nit-picky stuff — but people who volunteer as contest judges tend to be nit-picky people. Better to over-identify your work than to under-identify it.

(4) Have I included all of the requested elements on the title page? If the contest asked for two title pages (one with my name on it, and one without), have I made sure that they are as different as requested?
This is not the time to experiment with funky typefaces or odd title page formats. Unless the contest rules specify otherwise, put the whole thing in the same typeface AND TYPE SIZE as the rest of the entry. List only the information you are asked to list there. (Although if you want to add something along the lines of “An entry in the X Category of the 2006 Y Contest,” that’s generally considered a nice touch.)

(5) If I mention the names of places, famous people, or well-known consumer products, are they spelled correctly?
Okay, if no one else is willing to call foul on this, I will: writers very often misspell proper nouns, possibly because they tend not to be words listed in standard spell-checkers’ dictionaries. In a contest, that’s no excuse. Check.

To revisit every editor in the world’s pet peeve, most word processing programs are RIFE with misspellings and grammatical mistakes. I use the latest version of MS Word for the Mac, and it insists that Berkeley, California (where I happen to have been born) should be spelled Berkley, like the press.

It is mistaken. Yet if I followed its advice and entered the result in a contest, I would be the one to pay for it, not the fine folks at Microsoft.

Double-check.

(6) Have I spell-checked AND proofread?
Another hard truth: most spelling and grammar-checkers contain inaccuracies. They can lead you astray. If you are tired (and who isn’t, by the time he finishes churning out a contest entry?), the path of least resistance is just to accept what the spell checker thinks your word should be. This is why you need to recheck by dint of good old proofreading.

Yes, it is wildly unfair that we writers should be penalized for the mistakes of the multi-million dollar corporations that produce these spelling and grammar checkers. But that’s one of the hard lessons we all have to learn eventually: the world is not in fact organized on a fair basis. People whose job it is to make sure the dictionaries and grammar-checkers are correct are collecting their hefty salaries and cashing in their stock options without being able to spell Berkeley or hors d’oeuvre. Sorry.

Before you boil over about the inequity of it all, think about misspellings and grammatical errors from the contest judge’s perspective. The judge cannot tell whether the problem with the entry is that the author can’t spell to save his life, or he hasn’t bothered to proofread — or if some Microsoftie just couldn’t be bothered to check Strunk and White to see when THERE should be used instead of THEIR. (My grammar checker routinely tells me to use the former instead of the latter in cases of collective possession, alas.) From the judge’s point of view, the author is invariably the one who looks unprofessional.

This doesn’t mean not to spell-check: you should. But you should never rely solely upon a spell-checker or grammar-checker’s wit and wisdom. They’re just not literate enough.

(7) If I use clichés for comic effect, have I reproduced them correctly?

As a general, I frown upon the use of clichés in print. (You can’t see me doing it, but I am frowning right now.) Part of the point of being a writer is to display your thought, not the thought of others. Occasionally, however, there are reasons to utilize clichés in your work, particularly in dialogue.

You would not BELIEVE how common it is for writers to reproduce clichés incorrectly. (I would not believe it myself, if I had not been a judge in a number of literary contests.) And an incorrectly-quoted cliché will, I assure you, kill any humorous intention deader than the proverbial doornail. So make sure that your needles remain in your haystacks, and that the poles you wouldn’t touch things with are ten-foot, not 100-foot. (How would you pick up a 100-foot pole, anyway?)

When in doubt, ask someone outside your immediate circle of friends — your own friends may well be making the same mistake you are.

(8) Does my synopsis present actual scenes from the book in glowing detail, or does it merely summarize the plot?

As I have been arguing all week, the synopsis is, in fact, a writing sample, every bit as much as the chapter does. Make sure it lets the judges know that you can write — and that you are professional enough to approach the synopsis as a professional necessity, not a tiresome whim instituted by the contest organizers to satisfy some sick, sadistic whim of their own. Believe me, writerly resentment shows up BEAUTIFULLY against the backdrop of a synopsis.

And again, don’t worry about depicting every twist and turn of the plot — just strive to give a solid feel of the mood of the book and a basic plot summary. Show where the major conflicts lie, introduce the main characters, interspersed with a few scenes described with a wealth of sensual detail, to make it more readable.

(9) Does this entry fit the category in which I am entering it?

This is not a situation where close-enough is good enough: as the rather distasteful old adage goes, close-enough only applies to horseshoes and Napalm.

If you have the SLIGHTEST doubt about whether you are entering the correct category, have someone you trust (preferably another writer, or at least a good reader with a sharp eye for detail) read over both the contest categories and your entire entry.

(10) Reading this over again, is this a book to which I would award a prize? Does it read like finished work, or like a book that might be great with further polishing?

It’s a very, very common writer’s prejudice that everything that springs from a truly talented writer’s keyboard will be pure poetry. Even first drafts. However, there are in fact quantities of practical storytelling skills that most of us poor mortals learn by trial and error.

Although contests tend to concentrate on as-yet unrecognized writing talent, they are simply not set up, in most cases, to reward the writer who is clearly gifted, but has not yet mastered the rudiments of professional presentation. And this is very sad, I think, because one of the things that becomes most apparent about writing after a judge has read a couple of hundred entries is that the difference between the entries submitted by writers with innate talent and writers without is vast. An experienced eye — of the kind belonging to a veteran contest judge, agent, or editor — can rather easily discern the work of what used to be called “a writer of promise.”

In the past, writers of promise were treated quite a bit more gently than they are today. They were taken under editorial wings and cherished through their early efforts. Even when they were rejected, they were often sent notes encouraging them to submit future works. (Occasionally, a promising writer will still get this type of response to a query, but the sheer volume of mail at agencies has rendered it rare.)

Now, unfortunately, writers of promise, like everybody else, tend to have their work rejected without explanation, so it’s extremely difficult to tell where one’s own work falls on the talent spectrum. Did that high-powered agent turn you down because your query was in the wrong format, or because she hated your premise, or because she thought you could not write? Did your entry falter before the finalist round because you fiddled with the margins, or because you formatted it incorrectly, or because there were simply ten entries this year that were better-written?

To put it as kindly as possible, until you have weeded out all of the non-stylistic red lights from your contest entries, you truly cannot gain a realistic feel for whether you need to work more on your writing or not. If you are indeed a writer of promise — and I sincerely hope you are — the best thing you can possibly do for your career is to learn to conform your work to professional standards of presentation. This is one of the best reasons to enter contests that give entrants feedback on a regular basis, just as is one of the best reasons to take writing classes and join a writing group: it gives you outside perspective on whether you are hitting the professional bar or not.

Oh, and it helps to be lucky, too.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

I was sitting in a seminar on screenwriting last weekend — not that I have any particular aspirations to writing for the screen myself, per se; I just like to hear what folks in other parts of the writing biz are up to — when the gentleman teaching it, the estimable playwright and screenwriter Mark Troy, said something that startled me, a novelist.

“What is the most important line of dialogue in a movie?” he asked rhetorically, as if everyone in the room should already know the answer. I anticipated a trick, but his answer was perfectly straightforward. “The first line the main character says, of course.”

Well, apparently, everyone who has ever given passing consideration to writing a screenplay already knew this, but in my usual conference state — sleep-disenabled, moisture-deprived, and highly caffeinated — this struck me as a pretty profound question to ask about a novel.

Oh, I’ve been in (and taught) more craft classes than I can shake the proverbial stick at where we all obsessed about how important the first SENTENCE is to the success of a novel. In a particularly memorable one, the seminar leader gushed for twenty minutes about the first sentence of A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, in her opinion the greatest first line ever. (And as an editor at a fashion magazine whose most creative work was apparently a positively fawning biography of the then-governor of New Jersey, she let us know in no uncertain terms, we were not to dispute her opinion on this point.)

Now, it IS a remarkably evocative opening sentence, but the third time that she referred to that particular sentence as “the greatest opening sentence in the history of the English language,” I felt compelled to speak up. “You ARE aware that it was originally written in Spanish, right? So you’ve actually been reading a translation.”

She did not speak to me, or call on me, for the rest of the conference.

My original point (and I’m relatively sure I still have one) was that I have literally never heard any discussion in a writerly context about the importance of the first sentence that a novel’s protagonist says OUT LOUD. Perhaps because we only hear our protagonists speak in our minds.

The more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became. It’s pretty easy to see why the first line a character speaks in a movie would set the tone for the character, but often, the protagonist of a novel is introduced lines, paragraphs, or even pages before she speaks. She often THINKS before she speaks, in fact, or feels sensations, or even narrates.

But actually, the first words a protagonist speaks are often the way she is introduced to the other characters to her fictional world, isn’t it? It honestly an important moment, dramatically speaking, and I think it’s worth taking a few minutes to making those first words count. Why not use the opportunity for character development?

Naturally, as soon as the class ended, I rushed to my laptop, to see whether the first thing the protagonist of the novel I’m currently revising was, you know, catchy. Much to my surprise, what she says first is not only character-revealing, but positively integral to her character: the very first words within quotation marks are, “What can I do to help?”

I patted myself on the back so hard that I started to cough. My protagonist is a pediatrician who specializes in treating abused and neglected children — and who has spent her entire life bailing various members of her extended commune-dwelling family out of their various self-induced messes. I felt awfully darned clever, let me tell you.

But then I started to wonder: perhaps we all know subconsciously that the first line a character speaks is important; maybe most of our first lines of dialogue are pretty apt. Perhaps — hard as this is to believe — many of us have been making those first few words count without (gasp!) being told to do it by some writing guru.

At least, I would like to think so.

Which is why I am going to turn the question over to you, both for your commentary and your composition consideration: what is the first line of dialogue YOUR protagonist speaks in your novel? And is it character-revealing? If not, could you change it to make it so?

Hello, dear readers —

You are all especially dear to me today, my friends: so many of you have been writing in for pre-conference advice over the weekend that I feel as though the first thing I should do at the conference is spike the water supply with Rescue Remedy! Please do understand that thousands of people read this blog, so I cannot possibly read every potential pitch that is sent in. I do want to help you all as much as I can, however.

For starters, everybody, please: take a nice, deep breath. Repeat often.

I understand that getting ready to pitch, particularly for the first time, is stressful, but please do remember, agents and editors are only people, albeit people with power over whether your work gets published. They are not going to laugh at you, they are not going to make fun of your dreams, and they are not going to throw things at you.

How do I know this? The PNWA honestly does go to some trouble to make sure the publishing types they ask are nice to its members. (So if anyone, be it agent, editor, or speaker, is mean to you: please let me or one of the many fine conference volunteers know ASAP. Or write about it on the conference feedback form.) The agents and editors really are coming to the conference to find fresh new voices, so they are as eager to hear about your book as you are to tell them.

Well, okay, ALMOST as eager.

Generally speaking, they will be polite to you if you are polite to them, so try not to build them up in your mind as either evil demons bent on your destruction or angels who are going to hear your pitch, cry out in incredulous joy, and sweep your book off to Manhattan to be published tomorrow. In order to be successful in your pitch, all you have to do is convince them that your book’s story or argument is gripping enough to deserve their reading the first chapter.

Make this your goal, not convincing them that your book is going to sell as well as THE DA VINCI CODE or Bill Clinton’s autobiography. Approach the task in small, bite-sized pieces: tell the nice person in front of you your name, your book’s category, its title, its target market, and what it is about, briefly. Identify a few selling points, and have an answer ready about why it will appeal to its target market. And really, that’s all you have to do.

Breathing a little easier now?

Practice will make you calmer at the crucial moment, I promise you, so please, make friends with lots of other writers at the conference and pitch to them. Listen to other people’s pitches; over the years, I have learned a TREMENDOUS amount about what does and doesn’t work this way. (It’s also the easiest way in the world to meet terrific people who share your passions: literally all you have to say to start a conversation at a writer’s conference is, “So, what do you write?”)

And please, PLEASE take advantage of the Pitch Practicing Palace at the conference, where yours truly and four other excellent, already-agented writers will be ready and eager to hear you run through your pitch (ideally, BEFORE you give it in a meeting) and give you feedback on how to make it better. We have all been in your shoes, have all pitched our writing successfully, and have years of experience in knowing what makes a pitch work. I promise you, we’re all very nice people, and we all truly do want to help you present your book to the agents and editors in the best possible light.

When, I hear you asking, can conference registrants avail themselves of this FREE service? Why, Thursday, July 13th, 3 pm to 5 pm; Friday, July 14th (Bastille Day!), 7:30 am to 5:30 pm, and Saturday, July 15th, 7:30 am to 3 pm. We’re anticipating being pretty swamped beginning Friday afternoon (the actual pitch appointments begin at 1:30), so please, plan to visit us early (and WELL before your first appointment, please) to sign up for a time to practice with the pros!

And, of course, if you just want to meet me and ask questions I haven’t yet answered on the blog, that will be the place to find me for pretty much all of the daytime hours of the conference. But again, before the pitch appointments start is probably your best bet for chatting time.

Now, on to other business: sharp-eyed reader Brenda sent me a charming message this morning, pointing out that I had used the term PLATFORM last week without remembering to define it. My apologies; I spend so much time steeped in industry jargon that I sometimes forget to translate. (For a glossary of similar industry terms, please see my archived posts for September 23 — 28). Platform is a term that all of you, especially those of you who will be pitching NF, should know before the conference:

PLATFORM, n.: For nonfiction, the array of credentials, expertise, and life experience that qualifies you as an expert on the topic of your book. Generally, the first thing an editor will want to know about a prospective NF author.

Put another way, platform is the industry term for why anyone should trust a NF author enough to want to read her book. The platform need not consist of educational credentials or work experience — but by all means, if you happen to be a former Secretary of State or NBA superstar, do mention it. The platform is ANY reason, or collection of reasons, that you are the best person in the universe to write this particular book.

For example, in the case of my memoir, I have written about a very well-known science fiction writer, as others have before me; if you are not a SF aficionado, the films BLADE RUNNER, MINORITY REPORT, TOTAL RECALL, and the recently-released A SCANNER DARKLY were all based upon his work. (The book, should you be curious, is A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK, as of the last time I checked ranked in the 26,000s on Amazon! Catch me if I faint. PNWA members, please remember, if you should be kind enough to want to buy it at the SIGNIFICANT discount Amazon is giving for preorders, if you go through the PNWA member site to get to Amazon, the organization gets a piece of the action. I just mention.) The authors of the already existing PKD biographies had platforms that were pretty straightforwardly professional: they had done extensive research, conducted interviews with people who knew the man, and in some cases, even had in-person interactions with Philip. My platform was considerably more personal: Philip was married to my mother for 8 years; from the ages of 8 to 15, he was my primary adult confidante. Because of this, we saw sides of each other that we showed no one else.

Why is this a credible platform, in the eyes of the industry? I have direct personal experience that makes me an unusually-situated narrator; the fact that I was so young during our years of contact, and going through major changes myself, adds an additional interest. Furthermore, through my parents and a lifetime spent in contact with Philip and his friends, I have interview sources another writer could not.

See my point here? The fact that I have a Ph.D. is actually irrelevant to my platform for this book. It’s not why I am literally the only person on earth who could have written this memoir — and THAT’s what’s essential for a compelling platform.

All of you NF writers out there: prepared to answer questions about your platform BEFORE you walk into your meetings with agents and editors. Even my fellow memoirists — yes, I know, it seems self-evident that a memoirist would be an expert on the story he tells, because it’s his own life. (As someone whose memoir has been plagued by legal threats over whether I had the right to tell the story of my own life or not, I am here to tell you: not everyone may agree with you that your personal experience is yours to discuss in print.)

But a memoir is always about something in addition to the life story of its author, and your platform should include some reference to why you are qualified to write about that other subject matter. If your childhood memoir deals with your love affair with trains, for instance, make sure you include the fact that you spent 17 years of your life flat on your stomach, going “woo, woo” at a dizzying array of model trains.

For what it’s worth, novels are generally about something other than the beauty of their writing, too. They have settings; characters have professions. For instance, the novel I am writing now is set at Harvard, where I got my undergraduate degree: think that is going to make my novel more credible in the eyes of the industry? You bet.

Technically, a novelist doesn’t NEED a platform (and to set your mind at ease, Brenda: neither does any other non-NF writer), but it’s always a nice touch if a fiction writer can mention a platform plank or two. (See my July 2 post on selling points for tips.)

My, I got carried away there, didn’t I? My real goal for today was to fill you in on an agent and editor added to the conference list after my April 26 — May 26 series on those who were coming. So I took a gander at the standard industry databases (usual caveats about their accuracy), to see what I could tell you about them.

Kate McKean, the lately-added agent, until fairly recently was with Dystel & Goderich, the agency that represents me (and who is sending sterling agent Lauren Abramo to this year’s conference). So recently, in fact, that Ms. McKean is still listed on Preditors and Editors (always a site worth checking) as being at DGLM. Now, Ms. McKean is with the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. Let’s see what she had to say for herself in the blurb she submitted to the PNWA:

“After earning a Masters in Fiction Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi, Kate McKean (Agent) set out to start her publishing career as an agent in New York City… Her interests lie in contemporary women’s fiction, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, sports related books, pop culture, and health and wellness. She is primarily interested in people and the strange, wonderful, surprising, and heartbreaking stories they tell. She’s most happy immersed in a good book, especially Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Carver, and Chabon.

“Howard Morhaim Literary Agency represents a wide variety of clients in a number of areas including science fiction/fantasy, history, politics, literary fiction, science, business, and journalism. Some of the agency’s notable clients include Stephen R. Donaldson, author of the Thomas Covenant fantasy series, Joanne Harris, international best selling author of CHOCOLAT, and international best-selling author Arturo Perez-Reverte, just to name a few.”

Setting aside the glee with which the immortal phrase “she’s primarily interested in people” (as opposed to, say, those agents who eschew any topics relating to human endeavor?) raises in my bosom, what can we learn from this? What excites me most is that she has an MFA in writing — and from a good program, at that (and one that would render her NOT being a Faulkner fan surprising). This is a writer, my friends, and although it pains me to say it, writers understand other writers better than other people understand them.

In the past two years, while still at DGLM, she sold a book for middle readers, Suzanne Selfor’s debut CURSE OF THE MERFOLK, “about what happens when a brother and sister find a baby mermaid and the trouble that ensues.” (Little, Brown Children’s, 2006, in a two-book deal), and a three-book deal for women’s fiction writer Richelle K. Mead, including SUCCUBUS BLUES, “about a modern-day succubus living in Seattle who prefers her normal life to the alluring, shape-shifting life of legend and myth.” (Kensington, 2005) She’s probably had other sales as well, but if so, they were not listed in the standard industry databases.

As I said in my earlier agent and editor series (April 26 — May 26), an agent who is trying to build her client list may be a tremendously good bet for a previously unpublished writer. She may well be open to a broader array of voices, as well as more queries, than someone with an established list.

What gives me a bit of pause, though, is the fact that the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency listed itself in the latest GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS as not accepting new clients. As, I notice, they did in the 2003 guide of the same name. Since the agency does not have a website, I was not able to confirm or deny this preference. I wouldn’t panic, though, since they are in fact sending an agent to the conference: this might just mean that their staff is not fond of filling out the questionnaires the guide sends every year, or it might mean that they are very, very selective indeed.

I do, however, have ways of finding out who is represented by the agency, beyond the limited list above, which may help you determine if this would be the agency for you. Here are the names and titles I was able to turn up, in alpha order (hey, I’m a librarian’s daughter): K.J. Bishop (THE ETCHED CITY, Bantam Spectra), Robert Cowley (WHAT IFS IN AMERICAN HISTORY, Putnam), Robert Crease (TEN GREAT EQUATIONS THAT SHAPE THE WORLD, Norton), Stephen R. Donaldson (THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT, among hosts of others, Putnam), Christopher Fowler (FULL DARK HOUSE), David Gemmell (THE SWORDS OF NIGHT AND DAY, Ballentine), Richard Grant (ANOTHER GREEN WORLD, Knopf), Joanne Harris (JIGS AND REELS, Harper), Mira Kirshenbaum (THE EMOTIONAL ENERGY FACTOR, Delta), Stan Nicholls (THE RIGHTEOUS BLADE, Morrow; my, what a lot of sword imagery we have going on at this agency, eh?), Arturo Perez-Reverte, David Rosenberg, David Sandmire, MD (THE SAVE YOUR LIFE TESTS: LIFESAVING MEDICAL TESTS YOUR DOCTOR WON’T ORDER UNLESS YOU INSIST, Rodale), Michael Stackpole (CARTOMANCY, Bantam), Barry Strauss (THE TROJAN WAR, Simon & Schuster), Lisa Tuttle (THE MYSTERIES, Bantam Spectra), Jeff VanderMeer, (CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN, Bantam), Barbara Victor (TERRORISM; ABSENCE OF PAIN; MISPLACED LIVES; FRIENDS, LOVERS, ENEMIES; CORIANDER; HANAN ASHRAWI, PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST; GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER; THE LADY, THE LIFE OF ANG SAN SUU KYI; THE MATIGNON OF JOSPIN; GODDESS, INSIDE MADONNA; ARMY OF ROSES; THE LAST CRUSADE, Harper Collins), Ann Volkwein (ARTHUR AVENUE COOKBOOK, Reganbooks).

So if you have your heart set on Bantam, I would advise making friends with Ms. McKean as soon as possible: her agency apparently has some excellent connections there.

I had hoped to get to the new editor today, but I see that I am already running very, very long. I shall post about her tomorrow. In the meantime, keep remembering to breathe, conference-goers, and everybody, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Time for a quick jaunt back to synopsis land: sharp-eyed and insightful reader Bill has written in to ask: “Just how sacred is the four-page limit? How big should the margin be, since that can affect the word count?”

Good questions, Bill, and thanks for reminding me that I had not mentioned that the synopsis, like your first 50 pp., should be in standard format: 1-inch margins, double-spaced, in Times, Times New Roman, or Courier typeface. Printed on only one side of the page, of course, and on nice, crisp white paper. (This last might sound like window-dressing, but speaking as a frequent contest judge, I can tell you: it honestly is more pleasant to read a submission printed on nice paper. And don’t you want the agent or editor to ENJOY reading your submission?)
In Times or Times New Roman, a four-page synopsis is roughly 1000 words; no need to count, since 250 words/page in this typeface in standard format is how the industry estimates word count.

Go back and read that last sentence again, please, if you have been using your word processing program’s word counter to produce your word counts. THE INDUSTRY DOES NOT USE EXACT WORD COUNTS; IT RELIES UPON PAGE-BASED ESTIMATES. So you should, too: 250 words/page for Times or Times New Roman, 200 words/page for Courier.

Never mind that these are nowhere near accurate in actual word count: when in Rome, you need to use the same units of measurement as the Romans do; the state-by-state electoral vote count seldom bears much resemblance to the actual popular vote figures, but we still abide by whom the electors pick for president, right? Fighting for accuracy in word count estimation will get you nowhere, and in fact can even hurt your manuscript’s chances of being picked up by an agent: since professional word count estimates always end in a zero (think about it…), an odd-numbered word count on a title page or in a cover letter blatantly announced that the submitting author is new to the business. And, as you may have noticed, this is not a business that is very friendly to those who are not familiar with its rather esoteric ways.

The differential between actual and estimated word count, in case those of you who are veteran conference-goers were wondering, is why everyone on the agent panel goes pale (even under conference-center fluorescent lighting –which is saying something, since those lights make everyone look like a corpse) when some eager soul stands up and says, “I have a manuscript that’s 200,000 words, and…” Now, in actual word count terms, that’s probably in the neighborhood of 550 pages, but in industry estimation, that translates into 800 pages. Quite a difference, eh?

So in answer to your excellent first question, Bill: don’t worry about the actual word count of your synopsis; worry about the number of pages it covers. If it covers 3, 4, or 5, it’s fine.

I am going to revisit standard format again today, to make absolutely certain that every single reader of this blog who is planning to pitch at a conference this summer is aware of it well in advance.

Yes, yes, I know: those of you who are regular readers of this blog now exhibit a conditioned response to the term standard format; Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the bell, and you suddenly sit bolt upright, wondering if there was some unreported technical reason behind your last form rejection letter. You may, in fact, be tired of hearing about it.

However, in a submission to an agent or an editor, violations of standard format are serious business: when you’ve been asked to send chapters after a successful pitch, do you really want your pages to make you look unprofessional?

Here are the rules of standard format — and no, NONE of them are negotiable:

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

No exceptions, unless someone in the industry (or a contest’s 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. The entire publishing industry is one vast paper-wasting enterprise. 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 both side 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.

These are plain, not-too-pretty fonts, but they are in fact the standards of the publishing industry; it’s a throwback to the reign of the typewriter, which came in two typefaces, pica (a Courier equivalent) and elite (Times). As I’ve explained before, queries and manuscripts printed in other fonts are simply not taken as seriously.

If you want a specific font for your finished book, you should NOT use it in your manuscript, even if you found a very cool way to make your Elvin characters’ dialogue show up in Runic. The typeface ultimately used in the published book is a matter of discussion between you and your future editor — or, even more frequently, a decision made by the publishing house without the author’s input at all. If you try to illustrate the fabulousness of your desired typeface now, you run the risk of your manuscript being dismissed as unprofessional.

If you write screenplays, you may ONLY use Courier. 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. Do not use boldface anywhere but on the title page.

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

There is literally no reason, short of including words in languages that have different scripts, to deviate from this. If you are a writer who likes to have different voices presented in different typefaces, or who chooses boldface for emphasis, this is not a forum where you can express those preferences freely. Sorry.

(6) Words in foreign languages should be italicized.

Including Elvish. You don’t want the agent of your dreams to think you’ve made a typo, do you?

(7) EVERY page in the manuscript should be numbered.

This one is generally an automatic rejection offense. The standard way to paginate is in the header, so see point #8.

(8) Each page should a standard slug line in the header, listing AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/ABBREVIATED TITLE/PAGE #.

The safest place for this is left-justified, but you can get away with right-justifying it as well. And the header, for those of you who don’t know, is the 1-inch margin at the top of the page.

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

That’s twelve single-spaced 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 here might get your work knocked out of 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, and paragraphs are all indented, so there is no need to skip a line to indicate a paragraph break. 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.

Again, this was for the benefit of the manual typesetters, but I actually think this one makes sense. When numbers are entered as numbers, a single slip of a finger can result in an error, whereas when numbers are written out, the error has to be in the inputer’s mind.

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

Yet another signal for ye olde typesetters, archaic but still honored. It was so they could tell when the author intended a dash, and when a hyphen.

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, and many writing teachers tell their students just to go ahead and eliminate them. But standard format is invariable upon this point. It’s a pain, true, but is it really worth annoying an agent over?

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

If you catch an agent under the age of 30, or one who doesn’t have a graduate degree, 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 within the last couple of years, so be careful about it.

There you have it: literally every page of text (yes, including the synopsis, Bill), should be in standard format. Trust me, your work will be treated better if you follow these rules. 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 at an agency or publishing house.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

First and foremost: there’s still time to pre-register for the PNWA Writing Connections class I shall be teaching on Saturday, Prepping a Pitch with Panache. It’s free to PNWA members, and I think I can safely promise that attending with lower your heart rate during any subsequent pitches to agent by at least 10 beats per minute, and reduce your chances of fainting while pitching to virtually zero.

Now that I’ve gone through the basics of a submission synopsis, I’m going to spend a couple of days on the first 50 pages of your book. Why would I want to do a thing like that, you ask? Well, if an agent or editor likes your conference pitch (or elevator speech, of which more next week), generally speaking, she will ask you to send a synopsis of the pitched book, an author bio (if you haven’t already written yours, check out my posts for April 11 — 14), and either the first 50 pages or the first chapter or two of the book. So, by the same logic that dictated that it would make a great deal of sense to snap your synopsis together BEFORE you’re asked for it, wouldn’t it make sense to take a gander at your first 50 pp., to make sure they sell your writing talent well?

Here is an excellent test to see how your submission will play with the pros at an agency. Sit down with your first 50 pp., IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD, or have a writing buddy whose judgment you trust do it for you. Select pages 6 through 50, and set them aside. Then pull out pages 2 through 5, and set them in a separate pile. You should now be holding the first page, and only the first page, in your hand.

Read it. If this were the ONLY page upon which someone were basing his opinion of your writing talent, how impressed would he be? What about if he were basing it solely upon the first five pages?

Truth of the trade: if an agency screener does not like your first page, he will generally not read the rest of your submission. And if he isn’t pretty taken with the book within the first five pages, there is virtually no chance that he will read on.

Picked your jaw up off the floor yet? When an agent or editor asks to see the first 50 pp., he is NOT committing to reading ALL of it. He is committing to reading as much of it as it takes until he is satisfied that he does not want to sign you. So your goal in the first 50 pages is not just to draw a reader into the story or argument, but also to survive a page-by-page reading where any significant mistake could knock your book out of the running.

Draconian, isn’t it? At minimum, it’s not very nice, but it IS an industry truism: you need to grab the reader on page 1, and if you haven’t wowed the reader by page 5, no one will read the rest. Yes, it’s stupid; yes, it’s not the way that the consumers who buy books in Barnes & Noble make their purchasing decisions, and yes, it’s REALLY annoying that novelists and writers of complex arguments are expected to compress 400 pages of subtlety to just a few demonstration paragraphs.

It is, however, the way things work.

If I ran the universe (and the last time I checked, I didn’t, or my publisher would not keep receiving gratuitous legal threats regarding my memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK), it would not work this way. Agents and their screeners would read AT LEAST the first 50 pages before they accepted or rejected a book. And cows would wander the streets of Manhattan, providing free chocolate milk to all the poor children.

You are marketing your work in the real world, though, so make sure that your first page — nay, your first paragraph — shines with some of your most eye-catching prose. As a general rule, anything you can do to place your best writing within the first few pages of your submission, you should do. And if you can include some very memorable incident or imagery within the first few paragraphs of your chapter, so much the better. Agents’ impressions tend to be formed very fast, and if you can wow ’em before page 5, you absolutely should.

Actually, just as with work you submit to contest, the first page of your entry is far and away the most important part of your submission packet. 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 screener.

Make sure that something significant HAPPENS on page 1, too — consider starting with a scene in which your protagonist is active, rather than devoting the opening to set-up, as 99% of submitted novels do. Set-up can always come later in the chapter, and (hold onto your jaws now, as this may startle you) it may not be in your best interests to use the Chapter 1 you envision for the actual book as your submission, if it’s not the most action-packed of the book. If it is logically possible, why not move your strongest, best-written scenes to the beginning of your submission?

Authors do that all the time. There’s no law saying that you can’t move them back to their proper places after you sign the contract. It’s called revision, not false advertising. Trust me: after your book is published, neither your agent nor your editor going to come after you and say, “Hey, your book doesn’t start with the scene that began your submission! Bad form!”

Actually, many of the authors who use this trick ultimately decide NOT to move the scene back, on the theory that what grabbed the agent will grab the reader. And now you know why so many literary fiction books (and quite a few others) begin with scenes that pure chronology would dictate should fall much later in the book: the authors wanted to hook that most important of early readers, an agent.

How can you move your best scene up front? Try plopping it down before your current opening, as a prologue. I wouldn’t recommend moving more than one scene: the more you move, the more ‘splaining you will have to do in what follows. But one strong, emotionally-dense, action-packed scene to grab the reader in the first page or two can be very smart marketing indeed.

By contrast, let’s take a look at what you would have to do to pull off a radical change in your book’s running order. A clever novelist who feels her best writing occurs 75 pages into her novel might, for the purposes of submission, place her strongest scene first by starting her book on page 75 (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 submission. The job of the synopsis, then, in the hands of this tricky writer, would be to cover up the fact that the submission starts in the middle of the book. It would be just our little secret.

To put it in a less clever way: you can pull off starting later in the book, if the writing justifies it, but it’s a heck of a lot more work than simply moving one compelling scene. You also will need to make absolutely sure that your synopsis is compelling and lucid enough that it still all makes sense as a story.

“But wait!” I hear some of you out there cry. “What happens when the agent falls in love with my submission, and asks to see the rest of the book? Won’t it be apparent that I’ve misrepresented the running order? Won’t I in fact be placed in the position of having to rewrite the whole book in order to justify the submitted running order?”

Good question — and an excellent argument for moving only a single scene up front. There’s really no need to panic if you find yourself in this situation. Bear in mind that everything in the publishing industry moves either at the speed of light or with glacial slowness. It may well be one to three months between the time you submit your first 50 and when you hear back from the agent or editor (a period in which, incidentally, you SHOULD be querying other agents you met at the conference; a request for pages does NOT automatically imply an exclusive peek at your work, unless the agent or editor has specifically asked that you not submit it to anyone else). That’s quite a lot of revision time, isn’t it?

Even if you hear back more quickly, agents and editors are very used to writers fussing with their work. It’s perfectly acceptable to take a few weeks to revise your work before responding to a request to see the rest of the book. It is also quite acceptable — and quite common — for writers to respond to a rest-of-the-book request by sending the entirety of the book in its original running order, accompanied by a cover letter saying that since they submitted the original 50, they’ve been playing with the running order a little, and this is the result. As long as you say in the cover letter that you are open to changing the running order in accordance with the agent or editor in question’s preferences, there is nothing wrong with going this route.

In other words: established writers rearrange their work all the time for marketing purposes. Agents and editors are used to it, and generally are kind enough to write it off as merely symptomatic of the artistic temperament. We’re sensitive, you see: one day, we prefer a certain running order, then a flock of birds flutters by, and we’re equally convinced that a different running order is absolutely demanded for the book. In a word, they think we’re kind of flaky, as a group, and this is one of the few instances in which our perceived flakiness works in our favor. Milk it.

Above all, though, make sure that YOU absolutely love the pages you are submitting. Your first page should warm your heart, too. Sending your best writing, after all, is simply giving an accurate picture of your talent.

Never submit pages with which you are less than happy to an agent or editor, merely in order to get them out the door quickly. Chances are very, very slim that your submission will be read the instant it arrives, anyway, and often not by the same person to whom you gave your pitch, so you don’t need to worry about getting it there before the agent forgets who you are. You can pretty much rely on the agent’s needing to be reminded. That’s what the cover letter you send with your submission is for, the one that begins: “Thank you for asking to see the first fifty pages of TITLE. I enjoyed our conversation at PNWA, and I hope that you will be intrigued by my work.”

More on submissions tomorrow. In the meantime, for those of you who have not yet made your conference meeting choices because you don’t really know who these agents and editors are and what they represent, check out my archived blogs of April 26 — May 17 for the agents and May 18 — 26 for the editors.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Okay, I honestly am going to wrap up my synopsis-writing series today, so I can move on to a few words about prepping your manuscripts for the magical moment when the agent or editor of your dreams asks to see it, before launching into a full-on assault upon the subject of pitching your work! That’s a lot of material to cover over the next few weeks, campers, so stay tuned.

Back to yesterday’s list of questions you should ask yourself after you have completed a solid draft of your synopsis:

(4) Does the synopsis read as though I am genuinely excited about this book and eager to market it, or does it read as though I am deeply and justifiably angry that I had to write it at all?

This is a subtlety, a matter of tone rather than of content. Believe me, writerly resentment shows up BEAUTIFULLY against the backdrop of a synopsis, even ones that do not breathe an overt word about marketing. The VAST majority of synopses (particularly for novels) simply scream that their authors regarded the writing of them as tiresome busywork instituted by the industry to satisfy some sick, sadistic whim prevalent amongst agents, a hoop through which they enjoy seeing all of the doggies jump.

Show that you are professional enough to approach the synopsis as a marketing necessity it is. Remember, agents and editors do NOT ask writers for synopses because they are too lazy to read entire books: they ask for synopses because they receive so many submissions that, even with the best of wills, they could never possibly read them all. The synopsis, then, is your chance to make your work jump up and down and scream: “Me! Me! I’m the one out of 10,000 that you actually want to read, the one written by an author who is willing to work with you, instead of sulking over the way the industry runs!”

Mind you, I’m not saying that you SHOULDN’T sulk over the often arbitrary and unfair way the industry runs: actually, it would be merely Pollyannaish NOT to do that from time to time. Vent as often as you please; it’s healthier than keeping it inside. But it simply is not prudent to vent anywhere near an agent or editor whom you want to take on your work, and certainly not in the tone of the synopsis. The synopsis’ tone should match the book’s, and unless you happen to be writing about deeply resentful characters, it’s just not appropriate to sound clipped and disgruntled. Sorry.

(5) Does the first page of the synopsis SAY that it’s a synopsis? Does it also list the title of the book? And does every page of the synopsis contain the slug line AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/TITLE/SYNOPSIS/#?

I am always shocked at how few synopses identify either themselves or the author, due no doubt to a faith in the filing systems of literary agencies that borders on the childlike. Pages get separated; things get lost. Identify each and every page with a slug line, and tell the nice people that they’ve got a synopsis in their hands.

Standard format for a synopsis dictates that the title (either all in caps or bolded) is centered at the top of the first page of the synopsis, with “Synopsis” on the line below it. Then skip one double-spaced line, and begin the text of the synopsis.

(6) Is the synopsis absolutely free of errors of any kind? Not just what my word processing software tells me is an error, but an actual error?

Naturally, you should both spell-check and read the ENTIRETY of your synopsis IN HARD COPY, ALOUD, before you send it anywhere. Period. No excuses. As I mentioned yesterday, my professional editor hat gets all in a twist at the notion of any writer’s proofreading solely on a computer screen. It is well-nigh impossible to do with complete accuracy.

And don’t even get me started on the chronic inadequacies of most word processing programs’ grammar checkers! Mine disapproves of gerunds and semicolons, apparently on general principle, strips accent marks off French words, leaving them obscenely naked, and regularly advises me to use the wrong form of THERE. (If anybody working at Microsoft does not know the ABSOLUTELY IMMUTABLE rules governing when to use THERE, THEIR, AND THEY’RE, I beg you, drop me an e-mail, and I shall make everything clear.) Why, just a couple of days ago, when I wasn’t paying attention — hey, this is a busy month — it incorrectly changed a word in this very blog from “here” to “hear.”

I am fascinated, too, by the fact that its dictionary evidently does not contain any words that relate to the Internet or computer operations. Should I really have had to introduce “blogger” into its vocabulary? And I tremble to think how the grammar checker butchers dialogue. Suffice it to say, most standard word processing spelling and grammar checkers would condemn the entirety of Mark Twain’s opus outright.

My point is, like a therapist who doesn’t listen well enough to give good advice, a poor grammar checker cannot be sufficiently disregarded. 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. Read the manuscript for yourself.

If you’re in doubt on a particular point, look it up. In a well-regarded dictionary, not on the internet: contrary to popular opinion, most search engines will list both the proper spelling of a word and the most common misspellings. There is no gigantic cosmic English teacher monitoring proper spelling and grammar on the web. So get up, walk across the room, and pick up a physical dictionary. After so much time spent sitting in front of a monitor, the walk will do you good.

Made it through all of the questions above? After you have tinkered with the synopsis until you are happy with all of your answers, set your synopsis aside. Stop fooling with it. Seriously — there is such a thing as too much editing. Then, after you have gone to the conference and met the agent and/or editor to whom you will be sending it, read it again (IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD, naturally), and ask yourself a final question:

(8) Does my synopsis support the image of the book I want the requesting agent or editor to see? Would it be worth my while to modify it slightly in order to match more closely to what I told this sterling individual my book was about?

“Wait!” I hear some sharp readers out there cry. “Is Anne saying that it’s sometimes a good idea to tailor the synopsis to the particular agent or editor?”

Well caught, those of you who thought that. If an agent or editor expresses a strong personal preference for a particular theme or style in her speech at the agents’ and editors’ forum or in your meeting, isn’t it just common sense to tweak your already-existing synopsis so it will appeal to those specific likes? If your dream agent let slip in your meeting that she was really intrigued by a particular aspect of your story, doesn’t it make sense to play that part up a little in the synopsis?

A word of warning about pursuing this route: do NOT attempt it unless you have already written a general synopsis with which you are pleased and have saved it as a separate document. Save your modified synopsis as its own document, and think very carefully before you send it out to anyone BUT the agent or editor who expressed the opinions in question.

Why? Well, as I have been pointing out for almost a year now in this very forum, agents and editors are not a monolithic entity with a single collective opinion on what is good and what is bad writing. They are individuals, with individual tastes that vary wildly, sometimes even moment to moment, and certainly over the course of a career.

Think about it: was your favorite book when you were 13 also your favorite book when you were 30? Neither was any given agent’s. And isn’t your literary opinion rather different on the day you learned that you were being promoted at work and the day that your cat died? Or even in the moment someone just complimented your shirt (it brings out your eyes, you know, and have you lost a little weight?) and the moment when you spilled half a cup of scalding coffee on it?

Again, what’s true for you is true for any given agent, editor, or screener: a LOT of factors can play into whether they like the pages sitting in front of them — or the pitch they are hearing — right now.

Bear this in mind when you are incorporating feedback into your synopsis — or, indeed, any of your work. Just because one agent has given you feedback to tweak your story this way or that, it doesn’t necessarily mean that tweak will be greeted rapturously by everyone in the industry. Use your judgment: it’s your book, after all. But by all means, if you can modify your synopsis for eyes of the individual who expressed the particular opinion in question, do it with my blessings.

Tomorrow, on to prepping your submission pages. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

P.S.: If you live in the greater Seattle area — or live outside of it and just like long drives — why not attend the class I’m giving this coming Saturday on prepping your pitch for conference use? It’s free to PNWA members, and it will give you hands-on practice with people who have successfully pitched to agents in the past. How great is that? You can just drop in, but if you are fairly sure you would like to come, why not pre-register on the PNWA homepage, so we know how many chairs to set up?

Hello, readers —

Welcome to my series on how to prep a synopsis prior to the conference, so you do not end up running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off when the agent of your dreams asks you to produce one. As in instantly. I had thought I would be able to wrap up the series today, but as often happens, I found that I had even more wisdom swirling around in my head on the subject than I had previously thought.

Okay, let’s assume that you have completed a solid draft of your synopsis, and are now in the editing phase. Print it out, ensconce yourself in the most comfortable reading chair you can find, and read it over to yourself OUT LOUD.

Why out loud, and why in hard copy? As those of you who have been reading this blog for a long time already know, this is one of my most dearly-held editing rules. It is INFINITELY easier to catch logical leaps in any text when you read it out loud. It is practically the only way to catch the redundancies that the space constraints of a computer screen virtually guarantee will be in the text. Don’t even think of cheating and just reading it out loud from your computer screen, either: the eye reads screen text 75% faster than page text, so screen editing is inherently harder to do well. (And don’t think that publishing professionals are not aware of that: as an editor, I can tell you that a text that has not been read in hard copy by the author usually announces itself with absolute clarity.)

After you have read it through a couple of times, clearing out repeated words and ungraceful phrases, ask yourself the following questions. Be honest with yourself, or there is no point in the exercise; if you find that you are too close to the work to have sufficient perspective, ask someone you trust to read the synopsis, then ask THAT person these questions.

(1) Does my synopsis present actual scenes from the book in glowing detail, or does it merely summarize the plot?

You want the answer to be the former, of course. Long-time readers, chant it with me now: the synopsis is, in fact, a writing sample that you are presenting to an agent or editor, every bit as much as the first 50 pages are. Make sure it demonstrates clearly that you can write — not merely that you had the tenacity to sit down and write a book, because thousands of people do that, but that you have writing talent and sharp, clearly-delineated insights.

It is far, far easier to show off your writing in detailed summaries of actual scenes, rather than in a series of generalities about the plot and the characters. And if your favorite line of the book is not in the synopsis, why not?

(2) Does the story or argument make sense, as it is told in the synopsis? Is more information necessary?

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 basic 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.)

(3) Is it compelling? Does it sound like other books on the market, or does it sound original? Does it make me eager to read the book?

When agencies specialize (and most of the best ones do), you would obviously expect that they would receive submissions within their areas of specialty, right? So it’s reasonable to expect that an agency screener at an agency that represents a lot of mysteries would not be reading synopses of SF books and NF books, and romances and westerns, mixed in with only a few mysteries — no, that screener is probably reading 800 mystery synopses per week.

This may seem self-evident, but think about it: it has practical ramifications. That screener is inundated with plots in the genre… and your synopsis is the 658th he’s read that week… so what is likely to happen if your synopsis makes your book sound too much like the others?

Right: next!

“Wait just a cotton-picking second!” I hear some of you out there cry, the ones who have attended conferences before. “I’ve heard agents and editors jabbering endlessly about how much they want to find books that are like this or that bestseller. They say they WANT books that are like others! So wouldn’t an original book stand LESS of a chance with these people?”

Ooh, good question — I was planning on holding off on this one until I started writing about pitching, but it is relevant here, too. Yes, you are quite right: any number of agents and editors will tell you that they want writers to replicate what is selling well now. Actually, though, this isn’t what they really mean. They really mean that they want you to have anticipated two years ago what would be selling well now, have tracked them down then, and convinced them (somehow) that your book was representative of a trend to come, and thus had your book on the market right now, making them money hand over fist.

Or, to put it in terms of the good joke that was making the rounds of agents a couple of years back: a writer of literary fiction reads THE DA VINCI CODE, doesn’t like it, and calls his agent in a huff. “It’s not very well written,” he complains. “Why, I could write a book that bad in a week.”

“Could you really?” The agent starts to pant with enthusiasm. “How soon could you get the manuscript to me?”

You can cater to this kind of logic if you like, but personally, I don’t think it’s worth your time to get mixed up in someone else’s success fantasy. Given how fast publishing fads fade, the same agent who was yammering at conference crowds last month about producing book X will be equally insistent next months that writers should write nothing but book Y. You simply cannot keep up with people who are purely reactive.

The fact is, carbon copies of successful books tend not to have legs; the reading public has a much greater eye for originality, apparently, than the publishing industry. What DOES sell quite well, and is a kind of description quite meaningful to agents, is the premise or elements of a popular work with original twists added. So you’re better off trying to pitch LITTLE WOMEN MEETS GODZILLA than LITTLE WOMEN itself, really.

And the synopsis is the ideal place to demonstrate how your book differs. Make sure it does not make your book sound generic.

All right, the rest of the questions follow tomorrow (you didn’t think you were going to get away with only three, did you?) If you are planning to attend the class I am giving on prepping your conference pitch, it’s THIS SATURDAY; please do pre-register on the PNWA homepage, so we know how many cookies to buy. And, again, if you are still trying to decide whom to rank first for your agent and editor choices for the conference, check out my archived blogs for April 26 — May 17 for the agents and May 18 — 26 for the editors.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Well, it’s a lovely, sunny day in the PNW (and for those of you who are not local: no, that’s not an oxymoron), and a young writer’s thoughts turn naturally to… landing an agent and selling one’s book, right? So for those of you who are planning to pitch a book at this summer’s PNWA conference (or at any other conference), why not hie ye hence to the PNWA’s homepage and sign up for my FREE Writing Connections class on prepping your pitch? It’s this coming Saturday, June 24th, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Also (and I know the repetition is a trifle annoying for my long-term readers, but this honestly is useful information to those visiting for the first time), if you are planning to attend this summer’s PNWA contest, check out my archived blogs for April 26 — May 26, to get the lowdown on the agents and editors who are scheduled to attend. It’s always better to make major decision — like, say, what agent to pick for your pitch session — based upon solid information, rather than guesswork. (If you don’t already know WHY it is better, read on.)

Today’s blog is what I devoutly hope will be the next-to-last last in my series on prepping your synopsis for conference use and/or submission. As I have been insisting for some days now, you will be SUBSTANTIALLY happier if you walk into the conference with your synopsis already polished, all ready to send out to the first agent or editor who asks for it, rather than running around in a fearful dither after the conference, trying to pull your submission packet together. Then, too, giving some serious thought to the overarching themes of your book is an excellent first step in pulling together a pitch.

Even if you think that both of the reasons I have just given are, to put it politely, intended to help lesser mortals less talented than your good self, 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. That route virtually guarantees uncaught mistakes, even for the most gifted of writers and savviest of self-promoters.

Synopsis-writing is hard; budget adequate time for it.

If the task feels overwhelming — and terror is certainly understandable, faced with the daunting task of summarizing a 400-page book in just a few well-written pages — remind yourself that even though it may feel as though you effectively need to reproduce the entire book in condensed format, you actually don’t. You don’t need to depict every twist and turn of the plot — just strive to give a solid feel of the mood of the book and a basic plot summary. Show where the major conflicts lie, introduce the main characters, interspersed with a few scenes described with a wealth of sensual detail, to make it more readable.

Remember, too, that you should be shooting for 3 — 5 pages: no more, no less. If your draft persists in being less, and you are synopsizing a book-length work, chances are that you are not including the plot or argument in sufficient detail. So go back and reread it: is what you have hear honestly a reader-friendly telling of your story or a convincing presentation of your argument, or is it merely a presentation of the premise of the book and a cursory overview of its major themes? For most too-short synopses, it is the latter.

If you really get stuck about how to make it longer, print up a hard copy of the synopsis, find yourself a highlighting pen, and mark every summary statement about character, every time you have wrapped up a scene or plot twist description with a sentence along the lines of, “and in the process, Sheila learns an important lesson about herself.” Go back through and take a careful look at these highlighted lines: would a briefly-described scene SHOW the conclusion stated there better than just TELLING the reader about it? Is there a telling character detail or an interesting plot nuance that might supplement these general statements, making them more interesting to read?

I’ll let those of you into brevity in on a little secret: given a choice, specifics are almost always more interesting to a reader than generalities. Think about it from an agency screener’s POV, someone who reads 800 synopses per week: wouldn’t general statements about lessons learned and hearts broken start to sound rather similar after awhile? But a genuinely quirky detail in a particular synopsis — wouldn’t that stand out in your mind?

If your synopsis has the opposite problem, and runs over 5 pages, you should also sit down and read it over with a highlighter gripped tightly in your warm little hand. On your first pass through, mark any sentence that does not deal with the primary plot of the book. Then go back through and read the UNMARKED sentences in sequence, ignoring the highlighted ones. Ask yourself honestly: does the shorter version give an accurate impression of the book?

If your synopsis still runs to long, try this trick of the pros: 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 send with a cold query letter, but as I mentioned a few days ago, once you have been asked to submit pages, your synopsis has different goals.

Here’s a startling statistic: 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. If this seems dangerous to you, think about it: if the agent or editor asked to see Chapter 1 or the first 50 pages, and if you place the chapter BEFORE the synopsis in your submission packet, the reader 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?

Let me show you how it works (and yes, long-term readers, I have used this example before. But I’m using it slightly differently this time. So there.) Let’s say that you were Jane Austen, and you were pitching SENSE AND SENSIBILITY to an agent at a conference. (You should be so lucky!) The agent is, naturally, charmed by the story (because you were very clever indeed, and did enough solid research before you signed up for your agent appointment to have a pretty fair certainty that this particular agent is habitually charmed by this sort of story. See? Advance research really does pay off), and asks to see a synopsis and the first 50 pages.

At that very moment, you have on your computer your query synopsis. In it, the summary of the first 50 pp. worth of action 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?

“However, Marianne”s heart is soon engaged elsewhere: she literally falls into love. Dashing and romantic WILLOUGHBY (26) happens to be riding by when Marianne tumbles down a hillside, spraining her ankle. Just like the romantic hero of her dreams, he sweeps her up and carries her to safety. Soon, the pair are inseparable, agreeing in every particular: in music, in poetry, in the proper response to life, which is to ignore propriety in favor of expressing unrestrained feeling. When Col. Brandon is abruptly obliged to cancel a party in order to rush off to London to attend to mysterious business, the lovers are perfectly agreed that stuffy old Brandon made up the urgency in order to spoil their pleasure.

“All too quickly, however, it is Willoughby’s turn to be called away by mysterious duties elsewhere, leaving a weeping Marianne courting every memory of their happy days together while Elinor wonders why the pair have not announced their evident engagement.

“Edward comes to visit the Dashwoods, but he is sadly changed, morose and apparently afraid to be left alone with Elinor, despite Marianne’s continual and well-meaning efforts to allow the lovebirds solitude in which to coo. Edward is wearing an unexplained ring, human hair set in metal: he claims it is his sister Fanny’s but the Dashwoods are sure it is Elinor’s.”

Now, all of this does in fact occur in the first 50 pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, at least in my little paperback addition. However, all of the plot shown above would be in the requested first 50, right? So, being a wise Aunt Jane, you would streamline your submission 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 (late 30s) 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?

“Dashing WILLOUGHBY (26) happens to be riding by when Marianne tumbles down a hillside, spraining her ankle. Just like the romantic hero of her dreams, he sweeps her up and carries her to safety. Soon, the pair are inseparable, much to Col. Brandon’s chagrin. He rushes off to London to attend to mysterious business. All too quickly, however, Willoughby is called away, too. Marianne spends her days courting every tender memory of him, while Elinor wonders why the pair have not announced their evident engagement.

“Elinor’s love life is less successful: when Edward comes to visit, he seems afraid to be left alone with her, despite Marianne’s continual and well-meaning efforts to allow the lovebirds solitude in which to coo. Does his silence mean he no longer loves Elinor?”

See what wonders may be wrought by cutting down on the premise-establishing facts? The second synopsis is less than half the length of the first, yet still shows enough detail to show the agent how the submitted 50 pp. feeds into the rest of the book. Well done, Jane!

Tomorrow, if the publishing gods are with us, I shall wrap up the synopsis, so we can move on to other conference-related matters. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Welcome back to my ongoing series on how to craft an attention-grabbing synopsis BEFORE the conference, so you will not be thrown into forty-seven kinds of panic the instant an agent or editor asks you to send one. If you’re looking for information on how to register for said conference, don’t look here — check out the PNWA homepage, which will give you the skinny on how to sign up. But before you do, why not read some helpful background on the agents and editors with whom you can request appointments? Detailed low-down in my archived blogs of (longtime readers, chant it with me now) April 26 — May 17 for the agents and May 18 — 26 for the editors.

I went on (and on and on) yesterday about the importance of a novel synopsis’ demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that its writer is a gifted storyteller. For nonfiction, the task is a trifle more complicated. And lest you think I am speaking out of my area of expertise here, I should tell you: I have a LOT of experience writing and editing both. My memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK is due out sometime this year (the author is always the last to know such trivialities as release dates; all I can currently tell you for sure is that it is already available for presale on Amazon), and my agent has just sent out my first novel, THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB, to make the rounds of agents. Not to mention all of the synopses I see as a frequent contest judge and even more frequent freelance editor.

So yours truly has spent quite a bit of time in the last few years hunkered over the odd synopsis, let me tell you. I know whereat I speak. To get a sense of the authority with which I speak, kindly imagine the following words of wisdom booming from the mouth of Oz, the Great and Terrible.

In a NF synopsis, your goal is threefold: to give the argument of the book in some detail, along with some indication of how you intend to prove your case; to demonstrate that the book will appeal to a large enough market niche to make publishing it worthwhile, and to show beyond any reasonable question that you are the best-qualified person in the universe to write the book.

In 3-5 pages. I’m not entirely sure that I proved half that much in my master’s thesis.

The argument is the most important element here — in the synopsis you should not only show the content of the argument, but also that you can argue coherently. Yes, yes, I know: this seems counterintuitive. Wouldn’t the best way for an agent to check out your argumentative style be to, you know, read the book?

Let’s all take a mental holiday, shall we, and picture how much easier all of our lives would be people in the publishing industry actually thought that way? Ah, that’s nice: a world where writers’ talent was judged solely by thoughtful, prose-loving agents and editors, lounging on comfy sofas in sun-drenched lofts, languidly turning over page after page of entire manuscripts sent to them by aspiring authors. And look, outside that massive loft window — do I see a pig flying by, with Jimmy Stewart on his back?

Okay, back to the real world: your synopsis will have perhaps two minutes under an agent’s (or, more likely, an agency screener’s) bloodshot, overworked eyes. This isn’t a lot of time to establish an argument much more complicated than the recipe for your sainted mother’s cream of tomato soup, right? Even if your mother’s recipe consists primarily of opening a can of Campbell’s.

It is enough time, though, to demonstrate that you can make an argument where each sentence leads logically to the next. Think of it as a tap-dancing audition, your two-minute chance to show your fancy footwork: if you argue well enough here, the agent will ask to see the argument in the book.

If I seem to be harping on the necessity of making a COMPLETE, if skeletal, argument here, it is because the single most common mistake NF synopsizers make is to give only PART of the argument, or still worse, only the premise. Instead, they use the space to go on a rant about how necessary the book is, essentially squandering precious argumentative space with marketing jargon and premise.

But a solid underlying argument is the sine qua non of the NF synopsis. Period.

Don’t forget to mention what kind of evidence you will be using to support your claims. Have you done extensive research? Exhaustive interviews? Hung out with the right people? If you have a professional with the subject that makes you an expert, or personal experience that gives you a unique insight into the subject, try to mention that in your opening paragraph, or at least in the second. Otherwise, stick to the subject matter, and explain what the book is going to teach people about it.

I use the term teach advisedly, because it is often quite helpful for synopsis writers to think of the task as producing a course overview for the lesson that is the book’s content. How will this book help readers, and what kind of readers will it help? Obviously, a good professor would not try to cram an entire semester’s worth of material into the first lecture, right? Neither would a good NF synopsizer. Instead, both outline their work in general, try to convince their audiences that it is worthwhile to sign up for the class or buy the book in order to learn more about the topic.

Your first task, then: to make your subject matter sound absolutely fascinating. To achieve this successfully, you will need to show how your take on it is original — and to do that, you are going to have to spell out your argument. (Have I convinced you yet that that you really do need to present a cohesive theory here? And did I mention the importance of its being cohesive?)

Easier said than done, though: in the author’s mind, the argument often lies the details, not in the larger, more theoretical points. How can you narrow it down? I find that 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.

Don’t get so caught up in the argument that you do not include a BRIEF explanation of why the world needs your book, and why you are the best person imaginable to write it, the second and third goals on our list. If you are writing on a subject that has already been well-trodden by past authors, this is even more important. Make it plain why your book is different and better.

There is no need to be heavy-handed in your own praise to achieve this, either. To prove it to you, I’m going to give you a sample opening, modest enough that it would strike no one as overbearing. Read carefully, as there will be a pop quiz afterward to see if you can spot the ways that this brief paragraph achieves Goals #2 and #3:

“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 the US’s 1.3 million snowboarding enthusiasts, MOUNTAINS MY WAY is the first to be written by a geologist. Seen through the eyes of a professional rock hound with thirty years of experience in the field, the reader is introduced to mountains as more than an array of cold, hard rocks: mountains emerge as a historical document, teeming with life and redolent of all of the stages of human history.”

How did you do? Give yourself points if you noticed that the opening question grabbed the reader, showing immediately how this book might relate to the reader’s practical life; a rhetorical question for which the book itself provides an answer is a great way to establish a book’s appeal at the very beginning of the synopsis. Also, pat yourself on the back fifty times if you zeroed in on the subtle way in which this paragraph dissed the competition — the implication here is that the authors all previous books on the subject were such boneheads that THEY thought mountains were just collections of rocks. No one is naming names here, but those authors know who they are.

Still more points if you noted the clever (if I do say so myself) use of demographic information. If you have statistics on your prospective market, this is the place to mention them — here, and in your query letter, and in your pitch. As in:

“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 by fear.”

Why is it so important to hammer home the statistics in every conceivable forum? Well, no matter how large the prospective market for your book is (unless it is an already well-covered market, such as golf fans), you can’t ever, ever assume that an agent or editor will be aware of its size. ALWAYS assume that they will underestimate it — and thus the market appeal of your book.

(This is particularly true if you are pitching a book about anything that ever occurred west of, say, Albany to a NYC-based agent or editor, or any story set north of Santa Barbara or east of Los Vegas to an LA-based one. The news media are not the only folks who think that nothing that happens to anyone outside of their own city limits is worth reporting, alas. Regional prejudices still run strong enough that you might actually find yourself explaining to a charming, urbane agent with an MA in American Literature from Columbia or a law degree from Yale that yes, the inhabitants of Boise CAN support a symphony, and have for many years. And schools. And indoor plumbing.)

Back to our example. Bonus points if you noticed the sneaky way MOUTAINS MY WAY established the author’s status as an expert. If “Why are you the best person to write this book?” seems secondary to the subject matter, you probably haven’t pitched a NF book lately. Just so you know, it’s the first question almost anyone in the industry will ask after you mention casually that you are writing a NF book. “So,” they’ll say, reserving comment about the marketability of your topic until after they hear the answer to this particular question, “what’s your platform?”

Platform is industry-speak for the background that qualifies you to write the book — and unless you write in a technical, scientific, or medical field, it generally has less to do with your educational credentials than your life experience. In the case of my memoir, for example, my Ph.D. did not even gain a reference in my platform: what was important, for the purposes of establishing my familiarity with the subject, was that from when I was 8 until I was 15, the world’s most famous SF writer (although he was not so well-known at the time), who happened to be my mother’s ex-husband, used to call me on a regular basis to chat about life in general and what whoppers he could tell the reporters coming to interview him in particular. Far from my schooling establishing my expertise, my platform for this memoir had been magnificently erected long before I graduated from high school.

I’m going to be brutally honest with you here: very few writing teachers will advise you to include your platform in your synopsis, even for a NF book. That’s material for the author bio, they will tell you. Most of the time, writers include a background paragraph in their query letters, but personally, I think it makes a whole lot of sense to give a quick nod to the platform in the synopsis as well, if it makes your work sound more credible. Go ahead and state your qualifications, but keep it brief, and make it clear how those qualifications, well, qualify you to write this book.

They’re not going to know if you don’t tell them, I always say.

If your head is whirling from all of this, or if it’s starting to sound as though your synopsis will need to be longer than the book in order to achieve its goals, don’t worry. Tomorrow, I shall cover some tips on how to simplify the synopsis process, as well as how to slim it down if it becomes overlong. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini