Posted on - 5 Comments on Guest blogger Jonathan Selwood: Offbeat or Offensive?

Guest blogger Jonathan Selwood: Offbeat or Offensive?

Hello, campers —
Anne here, bringing you your promised treat for hanging on through Book Marketing 101: a guest post from the subversively hilarious author Jonathan Selwood. Since Jonathan’s first novel, The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse, is coming out from Harper Perennial next week, I’ve asked him to share his insights on how to market offbeat fiction.

He generously agreed — and the results surpassed even my high expectations. This is one seriously creative marketer.

If anyone is qualified to enlighten us on the subject of selling controversial writing, it’s Jonathan. Check out the blurb for his book:

For years, painter Isabel Raven has made an almost-living forging Impressionist masterpieces to decorate the McMansions of the not-quite-Sotheby’s-auction rich. But when she serendipitously hits on an idea that turns her into the It Girl of the L.A. art scene, her career takes off just as the rest of her life heads south. Her personal-chef boyfriend is having a wild sexual dalliance with the teenage self-styled Latina Britney Spears. If Isabel refuses to participate in an excruciatingly humiliating ad campaign, her sociopathic art dealer is threatening to gut her like an emu. And her reclusive physicist father has conclusively proven that the end of the world is just around the corner.

Now, with the Apocalypse looming — and with only a disaffected Dutch-Eskimo billionaire philanthropist and his dissolute thirteen-year-old adopted daughter to guide her — there’s barely enough time remaining for Isabel to reexamine her fragile delusional existence…and the delusional reality of her schizophrenic native city.

Now that, my friends, is a PITCH. Take it away, Jonathan!

/j-selwoods-cover.tiff

I don’t think I’m going to shock anyone if I say that it’s difficult to market an “offbeat” novel. The truth is it’s difficult to market any novel, and the less an author’s work fits into one of the currently hot genres, the more complicated the task becomes. So how does one best go about it? I have no #%$#&@% clue. What I do know is how I’ve tried to go about it.

As a first-time novelist with a dark comedy that at least one blogger described as “stumbling drunk through a fun house,” I began my marketing endeavors by looking online to see what some of the other less mainstream authors (read: mentally ill) like myself were doing.

I soon found that the answer was not much. Since the first thing I do when I hear about a new writer is start Googling, I was baffled to find that many of my favorite writers didn’t have websites or even MySpace pages. This seemed… insane.

I knew that if my little dark comedy was going to stand out in a tabloid world glutted with photos of pantyless starlets snorting cocaine, I’d have to do more than just send out a few reviewer copies and hope for the best. I also knew that the only way to get myself to put actual effort into marketing was to break out a fifth of Old Crow and try to have fun with it.

My first step was to design a webpage. Since I wanted the same kind of control over it that I have over my writing (I’m one of those sub-clinical OCD rewriters), I decided to learn HTML and design it myself.

Was this an efficient use of my time? No. In fact, it was a ridiculously stupid use of my time. I highly don’t recommend designing your own website unless you already know how to do it. In any case, at least I ended up with something that does not remotely resemble anybody else’s website.

When it came to writing my bio, I decided to forgo the usual banal listing of my MFA degree and utterly obscure publications, and instead compete directly with all those pantyless tabloid starlets by highlighting the nude cocaine parties of my own Hollywood youth. (Note: I’ve since discovered that if you Google “nude cocaine parties,” my bio comes up number one!)

I also had yet to garner any reviews (the novel was still in the editing phase), so I posted a bunch of embarrassing photos of my friends and just made up some reviews for a Readers Like You section. Why my friends allowed me to do this is beyond me…

Once I’d wasted so much time learning HTML, I decided I might as well design some more sites. Since the title of my novel is The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse, I quickly snapped up the domain and put up a bogus site purporting to scientifically explain said “Pinball Theory of Apocalypse.”

I think my favorite part is the description of what will happen when Pluto loses its stable orbit and collides with Uranus: “Once impacted, Uranus will quickly stretch out and expand into a superheated cloud of molten rock and toxic gas large enough to engulf the entire inner solar system.”

Since the protagonist of my novel becomes LA’s “It Girl Artist” by painting replicas of classic artwork with the faces changed to celebrities, I thought I’d also use the magic of Photoshop to put up some of her artwork in a gallery site. Macaulay Culkin as Blue Boy is my favorite, but I also like Tom and Katie as American Gothic.

It was at this point that too much coffee and perhaps too little lithium salt combined to send my marketing approach off into… well, a rather bizarre direction. In the novel, my protagonist is at one point pressured by her sociopathic art dealer to do an ad campaign for the hottest new craze in plastic surgery—vaginal rejuvenation. A deranged friend of mine here in Portland suggested that I actually create a joke brochure for vaginal rejuvenation.

The idea sounded so completely wrong, that I sat down and wrote the copy for it immediately. Another friend of mine in New York was kind enough to do the design work, and within a week, I had a lovely tri-fold brochure advertising everything from “Labial Microdermabrasion” to complete “Hymenoplasties.”

I then emailed a PDF of the brochure to my editor and asked if there was any way we could send out some of the brochures with the reviewer copies.

“Wait…You want me to send out a brochure for vaginal rejuvenation along with the reviewer copies of your novel?” she asked.

“Yes.”

There was a short pause.

“I love it.” She laughed.

(Did I mention that my editor rocks?)

In any case, Harper Perennial printed up the brochures and (still trying to justify all the time I spent learning HTML) I put up the Selwood Institute website.

Now you may be wondering whether sending out a vaginal rejuvenation brochure might perhaps backfire with some of the more humor-impaired reviewers. Well, the answer is, yes, it did—in fact, I’m still getting hate email.

However, The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse is a dark comedy, and anybody without a dark sense of humor is obviously going to hate it anyway. When you write something offbeat, you shouldn’t hope to please everyone—that’s what the mild-mannered mainstream is for.

Take a writer like Charles Bukowski (not that I’m making any direct comparison between my own work and his). The fact that so many people truly hate him only makes his fans that much more fanatical. When people came to protest his readings, he would blow them kisses.

The final move in my unconventional campaign was to set up a MySpace page —which is actually pretty damn conventional these days. Not only does it give me another place to try to hook readers with my bio, but it’s given me invaluable insight into just how disturbed my potential readership is.

In other words, I’m thinking about investing in some new deadbolts and a stun gun.

I should conclude by saying that my book has yet to be released, and I have no idea whether any of these techniques will work to boost sales. What I do know is that the next time I try to get a “straight” job, I’m totally #$#%$@. Seriously, who the hell is gonna hire the “nude cocaine party” guy?

Anne again: thank you, Jonathan! If that doesn’t get all of our marketing synapses firing, nothing will. In the midst of marketing season, it’s a timely reminder that knowing who your target audience is — and isn’t — is crucial to promoting a novel at every stage.

If Jonathan’s book piqued your interest, but you live in a part of the world that might frown upon your marching into the nearest bookstore and announcing, “Give me the book by that nude cocaine party guy!” here’s a good independent bookstore that just loves to ship things discreetly in plain wrappers.

Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: the pitch proper, part IV: what you are — and are not — trying to achieve

Book marketing 101: the pitch proper, part IV: what you are — and are not — trying to achieve

I dropped by a writers’ conference the other day — not to pitch, thank goodness, but to visit writer friends who don’t make it to my time zone very often. (One of the great advantages of spending years bopping around the conference circuit, taking some classes and teaching others, is that I have made friends with so many terrific writers all over the country.) And, lo and behold, before I had been conference-dedicated soil for an hour, I was coaching someone on how to pitch.

I know: out of character for me, eh?

I can’t seem to help myself these days — and not, I must confess, because I think that most of the pitch preparation information out there for writers, like the querying info was in the pre-Miss Snark era, is fairly cursory and often outdated. Hard as it may be to believe if you’re new to the pitch-constructing process, once you get the hang of it, it’s actually kind of amusing to come up with pitches for other people’s books. Like any other skill, it gets easier with practice.

Admittedly, it’s also much more fun when one is doing it recreationally, rather than professionally. (In case you need any additional incentive to get out there and pitch or query your book vigorously and often, I can safely say that one of the best things about having an agent is never having to pitch or query one’s own work again. It honestly is quite a relief.)

The timing of this impromptu coaching session was very apt, because it reminded me that I should address a couple of the more common conceptual stumbling-blocks writers tend to encounter while prepping their elevator speeches and formal pitches.

The first, and one I have dealt with a bit before, is coming to terms with the necessity of marketing one’s writing at all. From an artistic perspective, the primary issue should be the quality of the writing, of course, followed distantly by the inherent interest of the story.

Naturally, it comes as something of a shock to learn that one must make the case that this is not only a great yarn, but one that will fit into the current book market neatly, BEFORE anyone in the industry is willing to take a gander at the actual writing.

I know, I know: it seems backwards. As I believe I have mentioned before, I did not set up the prevailing conditions for writers. If I ran the universe — which, annoyingly, I evidently still don’t — writers would be able to skip the pitch-and-query stage entirely, simply submitting the manuscripts directly with no marketing materials, to allow the writing to speak for itself. Every submitter would get thoughtful, helpful, generous-minded feedback, too, and enchanted cows would wander the streets freely, giving chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk to anyone who wanted it.

Being omniscient, I would naturally be able to tell you why the industry is set up this way. Heck, I’d be so in the know that I could explain why Nobel Prize winner José Saramago is so hostile to the conventions of punctuation that he wrote an entire novel, SEEING, without a single correctly punctuated piece of dialogue. I would be THAT good.

But I do not, alas, run the universe, however, so Señor Saramago and certain aspects of the publishing industry remain mysteries eternal. (Would it kill him to use a period at the end of a sentence occasionally? Or a question mark at the end of a question?)

But I digress. The fact is, if a writer hopes to get published, the marketing step is a necessity, NO MATTER HOW TALENTED YOU ARE. Even if you were Stephen King, William Shakespeare, and Madame de Staël rolled into one, in the current writers’ market, you would need to approach many agents and/or editors to find the right match for your work.

So please, I implore you, do not make the very common mistake of believing that not being picked up by the first agent whom you pitch or query means that your work is not marketable. Or adhering to the even more common but less often spoken belief that if a book were REALLY well written, it would somehow be magically exempted from the marketing process.

Part of learning to pitch — or query — successfully entails accepting the fact that from the industry’s point of view, you are presenting a PRODUCT to be SOLD. So it is a TEENY bit counter-productive to respond — as an astonishingly high percentage of first-time pitchers do — to the expectation that you should be able to talk about your book in market-oriented terms as evidence that you are dealing with Philistines who hate literature.

You’re not, and they don’t. Selling books is how agents and editors make their livings, after all: they HAVE to be concerned about whether there’s a market for a book they are considering. They’re not being shallow; they’re being practical.

Okay, MOST of them are not just being shallow. My point is, a pitching appointment is not the proper venue for trying to change the status quo. Querying or pitching is hard enough to do well without simultaneously decrying the current realities of book publishing.

Selling is a word that many writers seem to find distasteful when applied to trying to land an agent, as if there were no real distinction between selling one’s work (most of the time, the necessary first step to the world’s reading it) and selling out (which entails a compromise of principle.)

When we speak of marketing amongst ourselves, it’s with a slight curl of the lip, an incipient sneer, as if the mere fact of signing with an agent or getting a book published would be the final nail in the coffin of artistic integrity. While practically everyone who writes admires at least one or two published authors — all of whom, presumably, have to deal with this issue at one time or another — the prospect of compromising one’s artistic vision haunts many a writer’s nightmares.

That’s a valid fear, I suppose, but allow me to suggest another, less black-and-white possibility: fitting the square peg of one’s book into the round holes of marketing can be an uncomfortable process. But that doesn’t mean it is deadly to artistic integrity — and it doesn’t mean that any writer, no matter how talented, can legitimately expect to be commercially successful without going through that process.

That is not to say there are not plenty of good reasons for writers to resent how the business side of the industry works — there are, and it’s healthy to gripe about them. Resent it all you want privately, or in the company of other writers.

But do not, I beg you, allow that resentment to color the pitch you ultimately give. It will not make you come across as serious about your work — as it tends to do amongst other writers, admittedly — and actually, it’s likely to insult the very people who could help you get beyond the pitching and querying stage. To an agent’s ears, such complaints tend to sound more like a lack of understanding of how books actually get published than well-founded critique of a genuinely difficult-to-navigate system.

Besides, neither a pitch meeting nor a query letter is primarily about writing, really: they’re both about convincing agents and editors that here is a story or topic that can sell to a particular target audience.

Yes, you read that correctly. Contrary to what the vast majority of aspiring writers believe, the goal of the pitch (and the query letter) is NOT to make the business side of the industry fall in love with your WRITING, per se — it’s to get the agent or editor to whom it is addressed to ASK to see the written pages.

Then, and only then, is it logically possible for them to fall in love with your prose stylings or vigorous argument. I’ve said it before, and I’ll doubtless say it again: No one in the world can judge your writing without reading it.

This may seem obvious, outside the context of a pitching or querying experience, but it’s worth a reminder during conference season. Too many writers walk out of pitching meetings or recycle rejections from queries believing, wrongly, that they’ve just been told that they cannot write.

It’s just not true — but by the same token, a successful verbal pitch or enthusiastically-received query letter is not necessarily a ringing endorsement of writing talent, either. Both are merely the marketing materials intended to prompt a request to see the writing itself.

Which means, of course, that if you flub your pitch, you should not construe that as a reflection of your writing talent, either; logically, it cannot be, unless the agent or editor takes exception to how you construct your verbal sentences.

I know, I know, it doesn’t feel that way at the time, and frankly, the language that agents and editors tend to use at moments like these (“No one is buying X anymore,” or “I could have sold that story ten years ago, but not now.”) often DOES make it sound like a review of your writing.

But it isn’t; it can’t be.

All it can be, really, is a statement of belief about current and future conditions on the book market, not the final word about how your book will fare there. Just as with querying, if an agent or editor does not respond to your pitch, just move on to the next on your list.

Does all of that that make you feel any better about the prospect of walking into a pitch meeting? Did it, at any rate, permit you to get good and annoyed at the necessity of pitching and querying, to allow all of that frustration to escape your system?

Good. Now you’re ready to prep your pitch.

More tips on pitching follow next week, of course, but I’m going to be taking the next few days off. I wanted to make it through the bulk of the discussion of pitching before I took a break, but that fact is, I’ve been posting every day of a writing retreat. Which, I must admit, has somewhat mitigated this week’s effectiveness qua writing time.

I’ll be back on Tuesday, though, never fear, to post, answer questions, and generally hang out in our little community here. In the meantime, have a good Bastille day, everybody — ponder those pitches, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: but what do I WEAR to put my ego on the line in front of utter strangers prone to rejection?

Book marketing 101: but what do I WEAR to put my ego on the line in front of utter strangers prone to rejection?

I’m in the throes of a major deadline, my friends, so I’m trapped inside, despite the fact that this is the kind of glorious midsummer day that those of us in the Pacific Northwest spend all November fantasizing about in nearly pornographic levels of detail. Oh, the writer’s life is glamorous!

So, in keeping with the spirit of the summer vacation I really ought to be taking right now, out seeing everyone’s knees poking out below Bermuda shorts and sunburns on beaches everywhere, I’m going to take a breather before attacking the formal pitch to tackle a fun topic today: what you should wear to a conference in the dead middle of summer.

This is a serious issue, you know. It may be 90 degrees outside, but conference centers are often air-conditioned to the point that ice will not melt in your latte. And a bathing suit with a fur coat thrown over it seems as though it MIGHT send the wrong message about your professionalism.

Although I would dearly love to hear the pitch for the book where that particular outfit would enhance the author’s credibility.

You should be thinking about your credibility as you gaze into your closet in the days before a conference. In many ways, these conferences are job interviews — at least the pitching part. You will want to look professional, not as though you have just stepped off the aforementioned beach.

Does this mean you should wear a suit? No, not unless you will be pitching a book about business skills, or another sort of NF book where your credibility as an expert in a tradition-bound field is a strong element of your platform. If not, overdressing can come across as insecurity, rather than professionalism, especially to a NYC-based agent or editor.

Why? Well, just as being naturally good-looking makes a BIG difference in first impressions on this coast (come on, admit it), being well and appropriately dressed is important in making good first impressions on Manhattanites. One way that people identify others like themselves on that fair isle is by dress — if you work at a fashion magazine, you dress one way; if you work in a brokerage firm, you dress another.

So to an NYC-based agent, if you wear a suit, depending on the designer’s label within it, he might identify you as a high-powered attorney, a minor official at a state agency, a spy, or a shoe salesman.

So while in theory, this means that you could conceivably skip the makeup, don your jammies, and wear your glasses to your meeting (because that’s what writers look like while they’re working, right?), this is not the time to be shabby. Neatness counts.

So the short answer to what to wear is this: nice pants or a skirt (but not a super-short one, unless you are pitching erotica — and even then, don’t make the world your gynocologist), avoid showing too much cleavage or chest hair, and go light on the cologne.

Unless you are pitching a book about mountaineering, I would avoid much-worn jeans or hiking boots, but to a West Coast conference, you could get away with newish jeans quite happily.

No need for women to wear heels or nylons, though. (That great tumult of joyous noise you just heard, gentlemen, was the female readership of this blog rejoicing.) Unless you are attending a conference in the South, that is, where the nice ladies are more put together than we Westerners in general.

(Things I have been offered the loan of, kindly, at writers’ conferences in the South by well-dressed relative strangers: nylons, a hair dryer, hot rollers, shoe polish, nail polish, and spectator pumps.)

Generally speaking, though, don’t dress up as if you were attending an afternoon wedding — a corsage would be a BIT much, unless you are pitching a book on prom etiquette — but don’t show up in shorts and a T-shirt, either.

Leave the tube top at home, I tell you. Ditto with the Hawaiian shirt with the eye-searing pattern of chartreuse pineapples on a field of rampant pink flamingos — unless you are pitching the definitive Don Ho bio, of course.

Oh, sorry — I didn’t mean to make your brain start humming Tiny Bubbles on a continuous loop. (RIP, bubblemaster.)

Stand back, for I am about to make a prophecy: those of you attending the upcoming PNWA conference will remember this advice vividly when you walk into the conference, because there you will see many, many people there in jeans and T-shirts proclaiming their favorite bands, 5K runs for charity, or membership in the Don Ho fan club. The Pacific Northwest is a pretty casual place.

How casual, you ask? Well, let’s just say that I’ve seen a LOT of knees over the years, and no one is going to offer to loan you spectator pumps.

However, at the risk of sounding like your mother: do as I say, not as they do. Even if EVERYONE else is dressed down, you will still make a better impression if you are appropriately dressed than if you are not.

And besides, if everyone else jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you?

Basically, you should wear what you might to the first major reading of your book in a bookstore. This is a terrific rule of thumb anytime you will be meeting with anyone in the industry, actually, because you will be demonstrating to an agent who is considering taking you on as a client, or an editor who is thinking about acquiring your book, that you have enough social sensitivity that they don’t have to worry about you showing up to future interviews or signings in your pajamas — or that Hawaiian shirt I mentioned.

Believe it or not, the ability to dress appropriately is equally helpful whether you write gardening advice or cyberpunk. People in the industry want to work with authors whom they can send into a variety of promotional environments.

If you doubt this, pay attention to what the presenting writers, agents, and editors are wearing at the next conference you attend. You’re not going to see a while lot of prints on the women, for instance; I’ve never been to a writers’ conference where at least one of the publishing professionals WASN’T wearing a plain, clean-lined pantsuit. I’ve seen entire editors’ panels swathed in subdued Ann Taylor crêpe.

As the immortal Laurie Partridge showed us all in my childhood, you can’t go wrong with a nice pantsuit.

Because the publishing industry does tend toward quieter fashions, this is not the best place to trot out the big floral prints (you’ll think about that, too, when you see how many people show up in them), or clothing bearing the insignia of a business or sports team. I don’t want to see your knees at all, under any circumstances, so just don’t pack the shorts or flip-flops with your conference gear.

Trust me on this one. The meeting rooms will be air-conditioned, anyway, sometimes to pneumonia-inducing levels of chill. You’re not going to want to wear anything that bares thigh, lest you die of exposure.

I hear some of you out there grumbling, and rightly so: for most of the conference, you will be sitting around on folding chairs, listening to speakers. So wouldn’t it make MORE sense to wear something comfortable, rather than fussy nice clothes?

In a word, yes — to the parts of the conference where you can reasonably expect to be sitting around on a folding chair, listening to speakers. But for your meetings, no. Would you stroll into an interview for a job you wanted in a halter top and ripped Daisy Dukes?

Okay, would you walk into an interview anywhere but Hooters wearing that?

There’s no law, however, that says you can’t leave your nicely-pressed shirt on a hanger in your car, or in the closet of your hotel room, to change into an hour before your appointment. In fact, re-robing just before your formal pitch meeting can be a good preparation ritual.

Two caveats about the preceding. First, if you plan on taking the brave route of approached agents to pitch at them in the hallways, do plan on being dressed up a bit the whole time, so you are always ready to make a good impression. The Flashdance look may be charming on you, especially the legwarmers, but you don’t want to have to think twice about accosting that agent next to you in the hotel elevator, lest your apparel suggest that you are proposing something different than you actually are.

You’ll understand that last sentence when you’re older, children.

Second — and this may seem a trifle frivolous, but it is nevertheless true — the lighting in virtually every conference center in North America makes everyone look positively ghastly. Red tones tend to do better in that light than yellows. And if you’re like me, and pale, you might want to spring for a little rouge or lipstick, so you don’t look as though you have spent the last year typing away on your opus in an unusually depressing crypt.

Unless, of course, you write about vampires, in which case you may feel free to look a trifle Goth. Other than that, stock up on the vitamin C, and smile.

Speaking of which, I now need to lock myself in my crypt and get back to work. Enjoy high summer, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on What makes a conference right for you?

What makes a conference right for you?

Well, it’s that time of year again, folks: spring is in the air (at least in my neck of the proverbial woods), those of us in the Pacific Northwest get to see the sun in brief, blinding glimpses after our long annual bout of being locked in a closet by Mother Nature, and a writer’s thoughts begin to turn to literary conferences.

Or is it only me?

I suspect not; this is the season when most of our mailboxes, literal and e-mail, begin to break out in conference brochures — that is, if you’ve ever subscribed to Writer’s Digest, Poets & Writers, or The Writer, taken a writing seminar, entered a literary contest, or attended a conference before. One of the plagues of modern civilization is the sale and resale of mailing lists, and the let’s-help-writers market is not immune.

Why pay attention to all of this recycling bin fodder now, rather than wait until the weather warms up? Simple: the summer conference season actually starts in the spring, running through October — and, since there is quite a bit of competition amongst conferences for attendees, early registration often carries some tangible benefits.

Commitment incentive, if you will. For instance, as I have mentioned before, the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association’s conference is offering an extra pitching appointment to the first 150 registrants. Not a bad reward for the ability to put a stamp on an envelope or log onto a website faster than other people, eh?

The benefits of conference attendance are, of course, clearly spelled out on the brochures and websites — masses of informative classes, famous keynote speakers, perhaps the opportunity to meet a favorite author or two in the flesh. But let’s be honest about it: most writers go to conferences primarily to pitch their work in person to agents and editors.

Why is this a good idea, given that books are acquired based not upon how well their authors can speak about them, but rather upon the writing, plot, etc.? Well, essentially, in-person pitching allows you to skip a step of the process. A very annoying step, as it happens, and well worth skipping: the querying stage.

It is really, really helpful if you walk into a conference understanding that: you are there not to be discovered by the agent or editor of your dreams, signed instantly, and swept off to literary stardom, but to garner invitations from agents and editors to skip the otherwise-requisite cold querying step and move right on to the send-me-the-first-50-pages step. You are there, in short, to grab at a chance to have your work judged on the merits of the writing, not on how a screener reacts to a 1-page letter.

And that, my friends, is not an opportunity at which to sneeze. Pitching at a conference can speed up a book’s journey to publication by years. So, as investments in your writing career go (especially tax-deductible ones, as a literary conference can be for a writer who files a tax return for a writing business), it can be a doozy.

Provided, of course, that you work the conference well.

For those of you who have never pitched at a literary conference before, here is how it works. Most conferences invite one or more agent(s) and/or editor(s) to speak. At some conferences, like the PNWA or the Surrey International Writers’ Conference, to name two of the best in my neck of the woods, every attendee is given, as part of the price of admission, a brief pitching appointment with an agent and/or editor. 5-15 minutes is average, but at some conferences, it is as little as 2.

At others, such as my favorite small conference, the Flathead River Writers’ Conference, only a limited agent and editor appointments are available. These appointments are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis, so it pays to register early.

Thus your first step in considering a conference as an investment should be to ask yourself: realistically, how likely am I to get face-to-face time with an agent or editor? Will I be able to register in time to get an appointment?

If you can land one of those coveted appointments at a smaller conference, it tends to be very worth your while to attend. Usually, in venues where every attendee is automatically booked for face time, the agents and editors will not have read any of your work prior to the appointment, but in a smaller, more seminar-like environment, attendees are often asked to send excerpts of their work beforehand, so the agents and editors can read prior to the appointments. (One of the few larger conferences where everyone gets an appointment AND the agents and editors read work first is Words and Music.)

At a larger conference, however, it substantially easier to pitch outside your scheduled appointment time, and thus to more agents and editors, for the extremely simple reason that there are more of them wandering the hallways. If you are brave enough to attempt the high dive of the conference circuit, the 1-minute hallway pitch, a larger conference will give you more opportunities.

Don’t worry; as we get closer to conference season, I shall be going over how to prepare both a standard pitch and the swifter hallway variety. (You didn’t think I was going to send you in there unprepared, did you? Perish the thought.) Right now, all that is important for you to do is think about the kind of environment likely to be most conducive to your presenting your work well. Not every conference venue works for everyone.

For instance, I have noticed that in conferences in the South, personal appearance is far more important than it is at conferences in other parts of the country — a bit odd, since most of the agents and editors trolling there for new writers tend to be Manhattan-, Los Angeles-, or San Francisco-based, where different standards prevail. (In New York, they notice whom you are wearing; in LA, they notice the body under what you’re wearing, and in San Francisco, they’ll notice how friendly you are. Seriously.)

As a Westerner born and bred, it took me several forays to Southern conferences before I figured out why relative strangers kept asking me if my luggage with all my high heels had been lost in transit and offering to loan me their hair dryers: where I come from, looking good without apparent effort is prized.

Suffice it to say, I now wear heels, and even — sacre bleu! — nylons to Southern conferences, suits in the Midwest, sleek black in the Northeast, and whatever happens to be clean in the Pacific Northwest.

Just as not every outfit is appropriate for every conference venue — leave the Mickey Mouse ears at home, unless you happen to be pitching to Disney executives — neither is every book, or every writer. By giving some thought to the kind of conference experience you are seeking before you send off that check, you can maximize your investment in your writing career.

Tomorrow, I shall delve into the thorny issue of how to decide whether the array of agents and editors scheduled to attend any given conference is right for you and your book. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Any platform will do

Any platform will do

I had to laugh today, when I was reading the publishing news. I’d been telling editing clients and blog readers alike for years than when brainstorming about their qualifications to write particular books, they should not be afraid to bring in resume points that have little to do with the topic at hand.

I love it when I am proved right.

One’s collected selling points as a writer are known in the biz as one’s platform, and the higher it is, the better, generally speaking. Usually, though, writers limit themselves to their expertise only as it relates to the book at hand, as though platform were synonymous with credibility: one’s 25 years as a marriage counselor, for instance, would obviously add credibility to one’s self-help book for couples experiencing problems sharing the medicine cabinet.

Don’t sneeze at unrelated qualifications, however, if they are interesting. My doctorate has absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter of my memoir – but you’d better believe that it was part of my platform for marketing it.

Why? For the same reason that any skilled lawyer would establish my credentials if I were called as a witness to a crime: my Ph.D. would certainly not make me a better observer of a hit-and-run accident, but it would tend to make the jury believe that I was a reasonable human being.

A platform, I have been known to say over and over again like a mantra, is like a pitch for oneself, rather than one’s book: whereas a pitch makes it plain to people in the industry why the book is marketable and to whom, the platform demonstrates why a reader – or, more to the point, people in the media – might be interested in interviewing the author.

So while your extensive background as a supermodel might not be relevant to your credibility if you are writing the definitive book on weevils, for instance, it would most assuredly mean that you would be a welcome guest on TV shows. Perhaps not to talk about weevils, but hey, any publicity you can garner is bound to be good for your book, right?

Case in point, as reported today on Publishers Marketplace:

“Jenna Bush’s ANA’S STORY: A Journey of Hope, based on her experiences working with UNICEF in Central America, focusing on a seventeen-year-old single mother who was orphaned at a young age and is living with HIV, with photographs by Mia Baxter, to Kate Jackson at Harper Children’s, for publication in fall 2007 (Harper says they’ll print about 500,000 copies), by Robert Barnett at Williams & Connolly (world). Her proceeds will go to UNICEF, where she is working as an intern.”

I find this listing a miracle of platform-raising, both for what it says and what it doesn’t say. Plenty of people write books based upon time living and working abroad, and a YA book of this sort is certainly a good idea. However, this is an unheard-of run for such a volume, so we must look elsewhere for an explanation of what made the publisher decide that this particular YA book is so very valuable: the author is, of course, the President’s daughter, presumably following in the well-worn footsteps of Amy Carter, the author of a YA book herself.

Amy Carter, however, was not summarily ejected from any major Latin American country for hardcore partying at any point in her long and colorful career, unlike Ms. Bush and her sister. (How much carousing would one have to do to be declared undesirable in Rio, one wonders?) Ms. Carter did occasionally turn up chained to South African embassies next to Abbie Hoffman during the bad old days of apartheid, though, if memory serves.

It just goes to show you: when you’re building a platform, any kind of fame is a selling point.

So keep those credentials flowing, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 12 Comments on Avoiding the faux pas, part I, in which I reveal to my readers the astonishing fact that contrary to popular belief, agents tend to be competitive people.

Avoiding the faux pas, part I, in which I reveal to my readers the astonishing fact that contrary to popular belief, agents tend to be competitive people.

Practically all of the writers I know – and they are legion – have been on edge lately. Including yours truly, a humble scribe who just sent off a NF book proposal to her agent Monday midnight. Considering that I was polishing this inherently annoying project – what writer wants to produce 35 pages of marketing copy on a book that has yet to be written? – during a pre-contest period when, by conservative estimate, I was receiving at least three panic-stricken e-mails per hour, asking for interpretations of contest rules and standard format, it’s perhaps understandable that I would be a little peevish.

My apologies to those of you at whom I snapped. Truth compels me to say, though, that by the last few days of proposal-writing, I was snarling at anything that came near my writing space.

I was under a lot of stress – in addition to the proposal and the contest deadline, I have a novel making its way through a publisher’s committee reading list AND a memoir being held up by another publisher — and it honestly is about equally time-consuming to answer questions one by one and to post each on the blog as comments so everyone can see the answers. Really, it’s better for us all in the long run for the questions to be posted as comments originally, and skip the middleman.

Signed, sincerely, the middleman.

So that’s my reason for being a trifle grumbly these days – but what is everyone else’s excuse? It’s more than just the February blahs. Contest season always leaves tempers a bit frayed; it’s the season, too, where the last of the New Year’s resolution queriers are finding SASEs in their mailboxes.

I’m not just asking out of idle curiosity, you know. For some reason, this February seems to be spurring a lot of writers out there to test the limits of the usual industry etiquette, or even to disregard it altogether. And in most cases, they seem to be doing it inadvertently.

All month, I’ve been hearing story after story from (and about; the professional writing world isn’t all that big, and notoriously gossipy) writers who have crossed boundaries that make those of us who have been in the biz a long time cross ourselves quickly and murmur, “Mon dieu!” under our breaths.

Because I have been, as I said, preoccupied, it took me a couple of weeks to figure out why. No, not why it should be happening in February – that’s anyone’s guess. I mean why writers, who in all other months of the year bend over backwards to avoid offending agents and editors, would be violating the industry standards for politeness all of a sudden. Care to hear my theory?

It’s because the writers don’t know about these standards.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a long time might not find this insight all that startling. “Humph,” I hear you mutter, “so what else is new? There are plenty of things a writer learns only through experience or because someone like Anne mentions it.”

Ah, but here’s the recent difference: in years past, writers learned industry etiquette at conferences, through writers’ groups, via the advice in the printed agency guides, by hearing horror stories, etc. Now, more and more writers are gleaning their information online – and thus are not necessarily in a position to have an industry insider take them aside and murmur, “Whatever you do, NEVER phone an agent who hasn’t called you first!” or “A conversation with an agent or editor at a conference is NOT a friendship – don’t e-mail afterward just to chat!” or “Never promise an exclusive for more than three weeks.”

For anybody who landed an agent more than five years ago, not knowing these things seems downright odd. But there you have it, the result of web-based community. Not all progress is progressive.

Which means, I guess, that it’s up to me to fill you in on some of these imperatives. Otherwise, I can’t really complain that you don’t know about them. And this way, you can in turn pass them along to other writers of your acquaintance, just as folks have traditionally done on the conference circuit, and none of my readers will ever end up being the one who insults the agent of his dreams.

I have nightmares about that, you know. I worry about you people.

Rather than just presenting you with a list, though, and to make this more interesting for those of you who have spent some time on the conference circuit, I’m going to spend the next few days running through a number of hypothetical situations. In each, I’m going to ask you what the fictional writer did wrong, and why. And to ease the transition from the contest tips of recent weeks, each of today’s scenarios is going to be about a contest winner.

So happy February, everybody. It’s time to get polite.

Scenario 1: Abigail has just won the Adult Genre Fiction category, and her head is still spinning from all of the congratulations. Agent Ashley, to whom Abigail had pitched earlier in the conference, tugs on her sleeve and reminds her that Ashley’s agency is already interested, upping her request for pages from the first 50 to the entire manuscript.

Flattered, Ashley agrees. But when Agent Andrew from her dream agency buttonholes her next and asks for pages, Abigail says that she can’t send them until after she’s heard back from Ashley. Andrew shrugs and walks away without giving her his business card.

What did Abigail do wrong here?

If you said that Abigail fell into that very common writer’s trap, being so enthralled by an agent’s – any agent’s – attention that she just said yes to everything she was asked without first thinking about her own strategic interests, give yourself partial credit. Ditto if you said that Abby acted as though she already had a firm representation commitment from Ashley before Andrew showed up.

Not every agent is the right fit for every book; Abigail should have been keeping her options as open as possible here. And as those of you who have pitched at conferences already know, agents ask to read hundreds of manuscripts that they don’t end up representing. Ashley’s interest, while flattering, is just that: interest, not a commitment.

If you said that Abigail’s mistake was to act as though SHE had already committed herself to Ashley, give yourself full marks with a cherry on top. This is known in the biz as giving an unrequested exclusive: Ashley does not expect Abby NOT to show the book too anyone else; Abby has just assumed that’s the expectation.

She’s wrong. And it’s certainly not in Abby’s interest for her to grant an exclusive without being asked specifically to do it. Until that agency contract is signed, the writer is a free agent, so to speak: binding commitments are expected from her, and none are implied.

In fact, Abigail’s manuscript probably would have gotten a quicker read from both Ashley and Andrew had she told them both other agents were interested. Why? Well, publishing is a super-competitive game. To a Manhattanite agent, a book over which there is competition is inherently more valuable than one that only he wants.

Yes, regardless of the quality of the writing.

I know: it’s counterintuitive, and assumes that writers are pitching and querying hundreds of times. But accepting that they think this way makes the publishing industry’s logic much less opaque, I promise.

Okay, here’s the extra credit question: what should Abigail have done instead?

Trickier, isn’t it? She should have told both agents that she was collecting as many requests for submissions as possible, and then sent her winning entry out to them all. Amongst agents, this is considered perfectly reasonable, and often even increases any given agent’s interest in the work. (See earlier comment about Manhattanite logic.)

Are you getting the hang of this? Let’s move on to a new case.

Scenario 2: Billy has just won first place in the Mainstream Novel category. Bertold, the hungry young representative of the Bob Baass Agency (Bob’s of Estonian extraction), immediately asks Billy for an exclusive look at his book. Since the Baass Agency has picked up contest winners at this conference in the past, Billy agrees, and does not pitch his work to any other agent.

Two months later, Bertold rejects the manuscript with a form letter saying that he does not represent this type of book, and Billy has to start querying again from scratch.

What did Billy do wrong?

A whole lot, actually. First, he granted an exclusive immediately after a contest win. As a former major category winner myself, I can assure you, the temptation to do this is vast: when you’re getting so much attention, often after so many years of fruitless querying, the notion that you could just hand your manuscript to the first agent who asks for it and never think about querying again is HUGELY appealing.

Yielding to this temptation lead to Billy’s second mistake: not continuing to pitch his work. As those readers who have already been with me through a conference season already know, I think it’s always a mistake to stop pitching after even the ideal agent has asked to see your work. The more requests for material you can garner at a conference, the more likely you are to end conference season with a contract in hand.

(See comment above about Manhattanite competitiveness. It honestly does explain so much.)

Billy’s third mistake was almost inevitable, after he had made the first two: he waited to hear back from Bertold before he followed up on other leads. A poor choice that probably stemmed from his fourth mistake, not having researched Bertold’s sales record prior to the conference, so he would know whether Bertold and/or the Baass Agency was a good fit for his work.

“But wait!” I hear some of you out there wailing. “You’re missing the point. Why on earth did Bertold ask for an exclusive on a book in a category he doesn’t represent? Why ask for it at all?”

Very, very good questions – and while they could both easily be answered by assuming that Bertold is a sadist who likes to make good writers cry, that’s almost certainly not the reason he did it.

Anyone care to take a guess? Anyone? Here’s a hint: does the Baass Agency send a representative every year?

If you know what’s going on here, you’ve probably been to quite a few conferences, or at least know other writers who have. The Baass Agency doesn’t want to miss out on the next bestseller. Bertold’s boss probably told him to nab as many of the major category winners as he could; the request was automatic.

With an exclusive, the Baass Agency can pass the winners’ work around internally amongst its member agents. In Billy’s case, no one bit.

Okay, what should Billy have done instead, other than run screaming from Bertold because he knew the Baass Agency did not represent his kind of book?

First off, Billy should not have granted an exclusive – he should have pitched to as many agents as possible at the conference, and sent submissions out to them all simultaneously. Telling them all that other agents (no need to name them) are looking at it, of course.

Not only does this prevent hard feelings down the line, it also tends to speed up the reading process at the agencies. If I hadn’t mentioned it before, agents tend to be competitive people. As those modern philosophers the Bee Gees informed us: “We can try/to understand/New York time’s effect on man.”

“But wait!” I hear some of you protest, stung to the heart at the audacity of saying no to any agent anywhere, anytime. “Wouldn’t Billy have offended Bertold by saying no?

Well, maybe, but it’s less likely than you might think. There’s only one reason that an agent ever asks for an exclusive: because he’s afraid that another agent will snap up the author before he can. I’ve never even heard of an agent’s changing his mind about wanting to see pages after an author has said no to an exclusive, in fact. But then, it very seldom happens.

If you don’t believe me, eavesdrop sometime on an agent who has just learned that a contest winner has granted an exclusive to ANOTHER agent; it’s not as though they regard it as a sacred covenant. As I said, these folks are a MITE competitive.

If Billy feared that he felt that he would lose Bertold’s interest by saying no, he should have set an end date to the exclusive right away. The polite way of doing this is to say, “I’d be happy to let you have an exclusive look for three weeks.” That’s a perfectly reasonable amount of time, and if Bertold finds he needs more, trust me, he’ll call Billy and ask for an extension.

After establishing the deadline, Billy should have pitched up a storm, to have a stack of business cards ready for his next round of queries. At 12:01 am on the day after the exclusive expired, Billy should have sent out a submission to every other agent to whom he pitched. THEN he could send a polite e-mail or letter to Bertold, telling him other agents were now looking at his work.

As you may see, what is and isn’t considered cricket within the publishing world is not always self-evident. Fortunately for me, by the time I won a major contest, I had attended enough conferences to avoid Abigail’s mistake; even luckier, I had enough friends who had won contests in the past that I knew to say, unlike Billy, to everyone who asked, “I’m not giving any exclusives, but I would be happy to send you the first 50 pages.”

It’s all about socialization, my friends: as a writer entering the world of agents and editors, you are going to need to assimilate to a new culture. Being aware of that can help you avoid giving gratuitous offense – and help you protect your own interests.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Increasing your chances of winning a contest: not naming names, or, calling a spade a diamond

Increasing your chances of winning a contest: not naming names, or, calling a spade a diamond

After yesterday’s suggestion that it might behoove potential contest entrants who write about real-life incidents to enter their work in both fiction and nonfiction categories, this seems like the natural moment to concentrate for a post upon a category dear to my heart: memoir. As a past PNWA Zola Award winner for best nonfiction book/memoir, I have a thing or two to say on the subject. And having judged in this category, I can say a few more.

So let’s get right to it, shall we?

Let’s start with the technicalities first: please, I implore you, if you are submitting a memoir entry, FOLLOW THE RULE ABOUT NOT HAVING YOUR OWN NAME APPEAR ANYWHERE IN THE MANUSCRIPT. And do bear in mind that this rule applies to not only your entire name, but EITHER your first or your last appearing alone.

Actually, every contest entry everywhere should follow all the rules in the contests they enter, but this is the single most common way for memoir entries to get themselves disqualified — and the reason that for a memoir entry, you should NEVER just print up the opening chapter of your book and send it in.

Unless, of course, you are writing anonymously, or under a pseudonym. Even then, it is a good idea to add a note on the title page, saying that since the contest forbids the author to mention his own name, you will be using “Bobby” (not your real name) throughout. Because, you see, it’s practically impossible NOT refer to yourself by name in the story of your own life — and judges are aware of that, and become accordingly eagle-eyed.

And why is that a problem? Everybody, sing along with me now: because the judges are trying to weed out as many entries from the finalist running as swiftly as possible. As usual, it all comes down to time.

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

So no, finding a clever way to get around the rules is not going to endear you to them. Not at all.

Make yourself comfortable; I’m going to tell you a little story. I went to college with Danny, a very clever, very ambitious writer who periodically contributed pieces to the on-campus humor magazine. Now, it was the practice of the magazine to publish all of its pieces without bylines, to encourage collaboration amongst members of the writing club. But as I said, Danny was ambitious: he, like many of the other writers in the club, was anxious to graduate with clippings he could use to promote his work later on.

So Danny did something exceptionally crafty: he inserted his own name into every ostensibly anonymous piece he wrote, much as Jerry Lee Lewis used to refer to himself in his own lyrics, so radio listeners would know who sang the song. Danny’s favorite way of doing this was to have an imaginary conversation with himself, so an alter ego could address him by name, as in, “Danny boy, you’re really in trouble now!” Occasionally, he would vary it by having an authority figure yell at his narrator: “Wilson, you’re out of line!”

(For the sake of MY own credibility, and because Danny is now a fairly prominent magazine writer, I should say straight away: to protect his identity, Wilson is not Danny’s actual last name.}

Now, as my parenthetical aside just told you indirectly, Danny’s little stratagem actually did help him generate the clippings he coveted, but he was relying upon his club’s editorial indulgence to let him get away with breaking the rules. In a contest, this practice would have gotten him disqualified immediately.

I bring this up not because there are legions of Machiavellian-minded rule-breakers out there, but because I have seen so many contest entries that have apparently done inadvertently what Danny did on purpose. Within the first-person narrative common to memoirs, narrators tend to talk to themselves all the time, À la Hamlet: “Danny, you get ahold of yourself, now.”

And that single reference, to a judge who was looking to pounce upon contest rule violations, could get a memoir entry disqualified. Yes, even though it would be highly unlikely, without the judge’s having the list of memoir entrants by his side for first-name cross-referencing purposes, for the judge to guess the author’s identity. Simply the implication that the author might have referred to himself can appear to be a rule violation.

So a word to the wise: innocent mistakes can knock your entry out of competition.

Now, I think this is pretty mean, personally. Usually, the author’s name (almost always the first) comes up as an unconscious slip, where it’s pretty obvious that the author thought she had expunged all relevant references to herself. But, as I have been telling you for the last couple of weeks, the submitter has absolutely no control over who is going to read his manuscript; it would behoove to prepare your entry, like your queries, under the assumption that the judge who is going to read it is the nastiest, most curmudgeonly nit-picker since, well, me.

“But Anne,” I hear you cry, pale at the prospect of encountering yours truly as a contest judge, “if this mistake is usually made inadvertently, how can I hope to avoid it?”

Well asked, oh fearful trembler. Experience sharpens the editing eye. Rest yourself upon the judge’s reading couch for a moment, and take a look at where these slips most commonly occur.

Let’s say the memoir’s author is named Biddy MacAlister-Thames, not a name anyone’s eye is likely to encounter on a page without noticing. Biddy should check her entry especially carefully in the following scenes:

(1) When another character directly addresses the narrator: “Biddy, have you seen the our pet tiger, Max?”

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

(3) And, in the VAST MAJORITY of childhood memoirs, when the narrator gets in trouble, some adult says: “Elizabeth Deirdre MacAlister-Thames, you come in this house this instant!”

Remember, in order to violate the rule, even if a character OTHER than the author appears with the author’s last name, it can cost you. So our Biddy should keep her eye out for these kinds of situations, too:

(4) When a third party addresses a family member: “Mrs. MacAlister-Thames, your daughter is under arrest.”

(5) When the narrator refers to her family collectively, or to a possession as theirs: The Easter Bunny had been unusually generous to the MacAlister-Thames family that year.

And, as I mentioned above, self-references to EITHER your first or last name, not just to both together, count as rule violations. So Biddy would be wise to do a search-and-replace for BOTH your first AND last names in your entry before you print it up.

Yes, it’s a tedious thing to have to do, Biddy, and yes, you have my sympathies for having to do it. But frankly, I would rather see you annoyed and on the finalist list than not proofread and disqualified. I’m funny that way.

Keep up the good work!

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

Eye on the prize: living with feedback

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

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

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

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

Say, by Epiphany.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on - No Comments on To pen name or not to pen name, part II

To pen name or not to pen name, part II

Yesterday, in response to a reader’s question, I went into the contentious issue of whether an author who writes in a number of different genres or book categories should use a unique nom de plume for each. As I pointed out yesterday, there are many in the industry who would say that unless your work sells awfully well, it simply doesn’t matter: unless the two books are likely to end up on the same bestseller table, who besides the alphabetizers at Amazon and a few scattered librarians is likely to notice?

Those who favor a different name for each book category would disagree: seeing the same name on disparate book spines can only lead to confusion, they aver. Not only does it make it harder for readers in a particular genre to track down the book they want online (for much the same reason that fans of an author named John Smith might have difficulties: a whole lot of hits would come up in a web search), but it also renders it less likely that an employee in a bookstore is going to be able to lead a curious potential customer to your book. 80% of the books sold in North America are still sold in bookstores, so word of mouth among bookstore employees is almost as important as it ever was.

Do you really, such arguers will ask an aspiring writer archly, want to make it harder for them to push your book?

It’s not quite this simple, however, and it’s probably no accident that defenders of the one-name-one-genre rule tend to be older people, ones who have been in the biz for 20 or 30 years. Quite a bit has changed in the interim: which books got face-out space on shelves, for instance, and positions on those tables near the cash registers, used to left up to the discretion of bookstore managers, but now, in the big chain stores, publishers rent that space in order to push their books. (I know; disillusioning, isn’t it?) And most buyers familiar with online shopping are too used to getting 3,000 hits on a single query to hold it against a particular author.

Also, computers have made it much, much easier for booksellers to track an individual author’s sales than in the bad old days – which makes it harder for distributors to push a second or third book to the big chains, if the author’s first book did not sell well. Or his most recent.

Which leads me to the most current reason semi-established writers adopt different names for themselves for new books, even if a subsequent book is in the same book category as earlier ones: to start fresh within the booksellers’ databases. It’s an industry-accepted means to clear the substantial stigma of a flop.

So the next time you pick up a book and think, “Gee, this new writer, George Washington, reminds me of Betsy Ross, that writer I liked five years ago. I wonder what ever happened to ol’Betsy,” maybe you shouldn’t wonder whether George was a writing student of hers in some obscure MFA program. Maybe you should wonder if Betsy had a name makeover instead.

All that being said, there are more one-name-one-genre advocates in the industry than those who advocate a more laissez-faire approach; unless a name is already fairly well established, many agents will advise writers to have different names for their fiction and nonfiction works, at least.

This does not apply to academic works, interestingly enough, from the industry’s point of view; frankly, practically no one in mainstream publishing follows academic publishing closely enough to notice if an author is getting published in both. Since there are an awful lot of professors who write fiction on the side, the more literary the book categories concerned (i.e., the better-educated the anticipated readership), the more acceptable keeping the same name is considered by agents and editors.

So it is indeed worth considering picking one name for each type of book you write. No one in the industry will fault you for doing it, certainly, and in a business that runs very heavily on name recognition, it’s not a bad idea to brand your mysteries differently from your literary fiction.

Which brings up an interesting question: given your druthers, which book cover would you rather have your real name gracing?

How do you pick otherwise? The standard wisdom dictates that if you already have articles on a subject published under a given name, every subsequent publication on that subject should be under that name. It establishes you as an expert – and that’s important for NF, for you will want to include these old clippings in your book proposals. If you have the luxury of publications under one name across a wide array of topics when you are moving on to books, figure out which articles had the widest readership, and keep the original writing name with those topics.

However, if your fiction and nonfiction is on similar subject matter, have a serious talk with your agent about whether you are more likely to retain your former readership under one name or two. Readers think a whole lot less about book categories than folks in the industry do: as much as publishing types like to tell one another that only a particular type of person buys a particular category of book, the fact is, the most cursory glance at how book buyers move around a bookstore will demonstrate that few readers look at only one or two shelves. If you are a good writer, your readers may well want to follow your work around the bookstore.

Recycle those past readers, I say.

So what does all this mean for strategizing your writing career? Well, obviously, if you are planning to write a book on a topic, it will be easier to sell to agents and editors if you have already published articles on the topic, under any name; equally obviously, if you are unfortunate enough to have released a book that did not sell well, you might not want to carry that contretemps into your next book’s marketing.

But regardless, naming decisions are generally made toward the end of the publication process, rather than the beginning: at the getting-an-agent stage, it matters far more that you HAVE past publications than which nom de plume you chose to slap upon them. Because even if you do decide to publish under several different names, it’s not as though you are going to keep your real identity a secret from your agent or editor, right?

You’re not Superman, after all. Although, come to think of it, have I ever seen you and Superman together?

Because, ostensibly, you would like your advance and royalty checks to be made out to the name your bank manager likes to call you, your real name AND any pen name you elect to use will be on the title page of any manuscript you submit to an agency or publishing house. (If you’re not sure how to pull this off gracefully, check out the Your Title Page category at right. There’s a standard formatting trick for this situation.) Trust me, if your agent thinks you should be marketing your next book under a new name, you’ll be the first person she’ll tell.

My advice: if you write across a number of genres or book categories, and are getting material published – hallelujah! – start establishing a different name for each type of unrelated work you write. That way, by the time you start publishing books in each of those genres or categories, your readers will already know your name(s).

After all, in the long run, isn’t your loyal fans being able to find your books far more important than what the industry wants you to do?

Keep up the good work!

P.S. Hey, if you live in the greater Seattle area, are even vaguely interested in children’s or YA fiction, and are not completely iced in this coming Saturday, December 2nd, why not check out the Secret Garden Bookshop’s 30th Annual Holiday Author Celebration? It runs from 10 am to 6 pm at 2214 NW Market Street (in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, so if you get a craving for lutefisk while you’re there, you’ll only have to step around the corner to get it), and they have an impressive array of well-respected writers all lined up to read their work – and chat with those who would like to emulate their successes.

Quite apart from the facts that this event is extraordinarily likely to be a lot of fun for kids and adults alike AND is a good opportunity for those of you with aspirations to write for the under-voting-age crowd to make excellent connections, the Secret Garden has a long track record of being simply marvelous about supporting local writers. It’s a genuinely marvelous independent bookstore, and that alone is worth celebrating! I’ll be there after 4:30 or so; if you can swing by to say hello, please do!

Posted on - 2 Comments on A writer by any other name…

A writer by any other name…

Oh, the luxury of having polished off a long series of posts! I get to write about whatever I want again. And what I want to do is revisit some of the many excellent questions readers have been posting as comments in recent weeks. My psychic detectors (and feedback from some readers) tell me that not everyone follows the comment strings — which, in many cases, would involve revisiting an already-read post — so I want to make sure that these important issues get addressed in the larger forum, too.

For instance, weeks back, inveterate wonderful question-formulator MooCrazy asked:

“Can a writer publish in different genres or on several different topics without diluting her ‘product’ and confusing the ‘customer?’ I think having been a free-lance magazine writer has resulted in my thinking that I can hop from one fascinating topic to the next. Please do a blog or series sometime about strategizing a writing career. Thanks!”

Moo, this is a great question, one that I know will speak to many, many writers. Most of us suffer from what Flaubert called, “the lust of the pen,” don’t we, an excited desire to write on a wide array of topics? Yet opinions differ widely within the industry about whether all of these literary effusions should be released under your primary handle: it really does depend upon both how well-known your writing is AND how common your name is. So lots of meaty discussion material here.

As with so much else that goes on in publishing, the prevailing wisdom varies on this point. Ask any given agent or editor whether a writer should (or could) use the same nom de plume across genres, and you will either be told that it just doesn’t matter OR that it would be absolute folly to use the same name on a horror novel and a mystery.

According to this latter school of thought, revealing that you have, like most mortal souls currently wandering the planet, a broad array of interests is a luxury reserved for only the best-known of writers: Anne Rice, for instance, or Stephen King. For lesser luminaries, this ilk advises, stick to one name per genre.

Well, that clears it up nicely, doesn’t it? Next!

No, but seriously, it’s worth looking into why each school of thought has its adherents before you make a decision on the subject. Publishing is a business, after all: presumably, if how we bill ourselves is of interest to the people who sell our books, it can only fascinate them for reasons related, however obliquely, to marketing. If using the names on our birth certificates for everything we write is going to be problematic, obviously, we should know about it.

About 75% of the authors I know who use pen names do so for non-marketing reasons, however. They may want to use their maiden names, perhaps, having spent their high school years fantasizing about how “Edna Curmudgeon” would look on a dust jacket. They may want not to use their current names, because they are writing a roman à clef, or because they have a nasty habit of incorporating their coworkers’ secrets into their novels, or because they really do not want their junior high school-age children to know that Mommy writes erotica. Sometimes, they just hate their birth names, or want to honor a passed-away grandmother. The reasons vary.

Or – and this is more common than one might suspect, given how hard it is for a writer to gain recognition in the first place – they want to retain their privacy. Now, there may be some very solid reasons for this; do you want, for instance, the signature you scrawl at book signings to be identical to the one that graces your checks? (I know a LOT of authors who develop a book signing-specific signature for this reason.) Do you want your readers to be able to look you up on the internet? In the local telephone directory? To be able to show up on your doorstep to argue with you about an ending they disliked?

Hands up, everyone who saw or read MISERY. (Speaking of writers with a history of writing under a number of different names.)

I have to say, having grown up around writers famous enough to have fans actually showing up on their doorsteps from time to time, I did have to think seriously about whether I wanted to publish under my real name. Both Philip K. Dick and Henry Miller, for instance, were well-established enough by the time I appeared on this terrestrial scene to attract the occasional stalker; I could tell you stories about science fiction conference incidents that would turn your hair gray overnight.

And, truth be told, I do have nonfiction published under several different names, so it would not be confused with my academic work. Most of the time, the objections to an academic’s publishing fiction under her real name comes from the academy side, not the publishing side, driven by the fear of being denied tenure, rather than confusing potential readers. Rumor has it, for instance, that there’s a quite prominent sociologist at a local university that shall remain nameless who writes steamy novels about her coworkers under an absurdly obvious pseudonym. But I digress.

However, once I decided to write a memoir, I made the decision: if I’m going to be honest about everything else in my life, why not own up to my real name? (Yes, believe it or not, Anne Mini is in fact the name on my birth certificate. My parents thought about my publishing career, too: according to family legend, they asked the maternity nurse to type out the name possibilities for me before they committed, so they could see what each would look like in print – and thus on a dust jacket.)

I’ve met a LOT of aspiring writers who fear the invasion of their privacy, but let’s be realistic about this for a moment: how many of your favorite authors would you recognize if you walked by them on the street? Most jacket photos are seriously outdated – sometimes for reasons of vanity, sometimes for reasons of economy, sometimes to make the author more fan-repellent – and let’s face it, few fiction writers are famous enough to be interviewed much on television. The chances of your being spotted just because you travel under your pen name are minimal. And if your name is a common one, changing it will not protect you.

Many writers change their names to make them either less common, less ethnic, or more memorable — the writer’s choice, mind you, rarely the agent or publisher’s. I happen to have been born with a very memorable name (a good indicator: how easy it was for kids to make fun of it in elementary school; I’ll spare you what they came up with for me), but if your name is, say, John Smith, you might want to punch it up a trifle. Ditto if you happen to have been christened Ernest Hemingway or Alice Walker – you really do want a name that readers will identify solely with you.

The ethnicity question is less straightforward. On general principle, I tend to frown upon writers (or actors, or directors, or politicians) Anglicizing their names, because collectively, it conveys the false impression that authors with non-northern European monikers are less worth reading. If you doubt the cumulative effect, think about the movie stars of yesteryear: to judge by their stage names, almost all of them hopped directly from the British Isles to Hollywood. And practically none of them, according to the names spelled out in lights, were Jewish, a fact that must have come as something of a surprise to their mothers.

The practice of automatic Anglicization is less common than it used to be, of course, but people still do it, alas. The usual argument is that more mainstream names are less likely to be mispronounced, and speaking as someone with Greek middle names, I guess I can understand that. Although my second middle name, Apostolides, is on every diploma I have ever received, and I always provided a phonetic transcription of it, every graduation of my life has been exactly the same: the degree-conferrer looks down at my diploma, pales visibly, looks up at me helplessly – and then announces me as only Anne Mini. Polysyllabic names are not for the faint of heart. And naturally, there is a good argument to be made in favor of your potential readers being able to walk into a bookstore and ask for your work by name, rather than stammering, “Do you have a book by Anne Apos…um…Apos…you know, that Greek lady?”

Does all of this seem incidental to the issue of whether or not it makes sense to use different pen names for different types of book? Actually, it isn’t: for those who say it doesn’t matter, the concerns above are the primary reasons for a writer to use an alternate name. Unless you sell a significant number of books in one genre, they argue, it’s not likely to confuse anyone who has ever done a computer search before to find you listed as an author in another genre.

If it excites comment at all amongst booksellers, they say, it will be of the “Margaret Atwood writes mysteries, too? No kidding?” variety, not the “Oh, my God, there’s a Margaret Atwood listed under fiction, and one under cookbooks! Am I going INSANE?!?” type.

Tomorrow, I’ll deal a bit more with the other, and rather more common, view on the subject. In the meantime, write widely, dear readers – and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Contests, Part IV: But is it worth it?

Contests, Part IV: But is it worth it?

Howdy, campers —

 

Welcome to Part IV of my holiday present to my loyal readers: a multi-part series on how to make literary contests work to your best advantage. Soon, I shall be moving on to tips that will give you a technical edge in most writing competitions, but first, I want to continue my discussion of how to decide whether any particular contest is going to be worth your entering.

 

This criterion (see earlier blogs from this week for the other criteria) is perhaps the most important factor to consider in evaluating a contest — other than whether your writing is ready to face competition, of course. Unlike the other criteria, which mostly focused upon the contest itself, this consideration is about you and your resources.

 

The fifth question to ask yourself: will entering the contest take up too much time?

 

Unfortunately, there are few contests out there, especially for longer works, that simply require entrants to print up an already-existing piece, slide it into an envelope, write a check for the entry fee, and slap a stamp upon it.

 

Pretty much all require the entrant to fill out an entry form — which range from ultra-simple contact information to outright demands that you answer essay questions. Do be aware that every time you fill out one of these, you are tacitly agreeing to be placed upon the sponsoring organization AND every piece of information you give is subject to resale to marketing firms, unless the sponsor states outright on the form that it will not do so. (Did you think those offers from Writers Digest and The Advocate just found their way into your mailbox magically?) As with any information you send out, be careful not to provide any information that is not already public knowledge.

 

How do you know if what is being asked of you is de trop? Well, a one- or at most two-page application form is ample for a literary contest; a three- or four-page application is fair for a fellowship. Anything more than that, and you should start to wonder what they’re doing with all of this information. A contest that gives out monetary awards will need your Social Security number eventually, but they really need this information only for the winners. I would balk about giving it up front.

 

I have seen contest entries that ask writers to list character references — an odd request, given that the history of our art form is riddled with notorious rakes. I’m not sure I believe that a contest should throw out the work of a William Makepeace Thackeray or an H.G. Wells because they kept mistresses… or disqualify Emily Dickenson’s poetry submission because her neighbors noticed that she didn’t much like to go outside.

 

I have asked contest organizers why they do this, and they claim that it is so they can rule out people whose wins might embarrass the organization giving the award — basically, so they do not wake up one day and read that they gave their highest accolade to Ted Bundy. Frankly, I would MUCH rather see mass murderers, child molesters, and other violent felons turning their energies to the gentle craft of writing than engaging in their other, more bloody pursuits; some awfully good poetry and prose has been written in jail cells. I do not, however, run an organization fearful of negative publicity.

 

My suspicious nature rears its paranoid head whenever I see requests for references. If an entrant lists one of the contest judges as a reference, is the entry handled differently? If I can list a famous name as a reference, are my chances of winning better? Only the conference organizers know for sure.

 

Contest entry forms frequently ask you to list your writing credentials, which I find bizarre in contests where the judging is supposed to be blind. Again, perhaps I am suspicious, but I always wonder if entries from authors with previous contest wins or publication credentials go into a different pile than the rest. They shouldn’t, if the judging is genuinely blind, but to quote the late great Fats Waller, “One never knows, do one?”

 

I’m not saying that you should rule out contests that make such requests — but I do think that the more personal information the organization asks for, the more careful your background check should be. When I see a request for references, for instance, I automatically check and see if the judges and/or their students have won previous competitions. A lot of the requesters are indeed on the up-and-up, but there is no surer waste of an honest writer’s time, talent, and resources than entering a rigged contest.

 

You can also save yourself a lot of time if you avoid contests that make entrants jump through a lot of extraneous hoops in preparing a submission. Specific typefaces. Fancy paper. Odd margin requirements. Expensive binding. All of these will eat up your time and money, without the end result’s being truly indicative of the quality of your work — all conforming with such requirements really shows is that an entrant can follow directions.

 

My general rule of thumb is that if I can pull together a contest entry with already-written material within a day’s worth of writing time, I consider it reasonable. If a contest requires time-consuming funky formatting, or printing on special contest forms, or wacko binding, I just don’t bother anymore, because to my contest-experienced eyes, these requests are not for my benefit, but theirs.

 

Because — and I am about to reveal another secret of the contest trade here — the primary purpose of these elaborate requests for packaging is to make it as easy as possible to disqualify entries. By setting up stringent and easily-visible cosmetic requirements, the organizers have maximized the number of entries they can simply toss aside, unread: the more that they ask you to do to package the entry, the more ways you can go wrong.

 

Interestingly enough, many of the organizers of contests that establish these demands are quite open about its being merely an exercise in rule-following. Think about it: if they really only wanted standardization amongst the entries, they could easily just say, “We will only accept entries in standard manuscript format.” No fuss, no bother, and besides, all of their entrants who want to get published should be using standard format, anyway, right? (If you are not already aware of the requirements of standard format, do yourself a favor and read my posting of December 8. Manuscripts not conforming to standard format tend to be rejected unread in both contest situations and in agents’ offices.)

 

Instead, the organizers in this type of contest can merely assign some luckless intern or volunteer to go through the entries before the judges see them and pluck out any that are in the wrong type of folder, printed on the wrong type of paper, don’t have the right funky margins… well, you get the idea. Voilà! The number of entries the judges have to read has magically decreased!

 

I find this practice annoying, frankly; it provides the organization with the illusion of selectivity on bases that have nothing to do with the quality of the writing. And that, my friends, is unfair to writers everywhere.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

– Anne Mini