Author: Admin147

Hello, readers —

In yesterday’s post, I discussed the role that tone can play in a Presentation category score. In reading it over, I realized that I might have been a trifle harsh on contest judges. I’m sure that there are many who don’t transmogrify into fire-breathing dragons after intensive screening of entries. Many do, however, and my underlying point is that as a contest entrant, you can never be sure which will end up judging your manuscript. Best to be on the safe side.

As they tell children in England, manners cost nothing.

The Presentation category is also where questions of continuity and coherence are rated. Continuity covers two major issues, consistency (on all levels, from tone to what the protagonist’s sister is called by intimates) and flow. Does the argument unfold in the manner it should, or does it stop cold from time to time? Here again, a pair of outside eyes screening your entry for continuity problems can be extremely helpful.

Coherence is an easy one to double-check before submitting an entry: just have a third party who knows nothing about the story you are telling read through the entry. Then have this generous friend tell the story back to you. If any of the essentials come back to you garbled (or worse, missing), there are probably some coherence problems.

95% of the time, coherence issues stem from the enthusiasm of the writer. The writer so longs to convey the story or the argument to the reader that he rushes on, willy-nilly, all caught up in the momentum of communication. Tight pacing is great, but all too often, explanation — and yes, even meaning — can fall along the wayside. Judges feel bad subtracting points from such entries, because the writer’s passion for the material comes through so clearly, but subtract they must.

Pieces stuffed with jargon almost invariably end up with low Presentation scores. Here, the writer walks a fine line: yes, it is wonderful when you can present people in a field as they really talk, but as the author, it’s your job to make sure they are comprehensible to the lay reader. If not, the reader has to spend additional time on each jargon-ridden sentence, trying to figure out from context what those bizarre phrases could possibly mean. Within the context of a contest entry, every extra second spent in translation will be costly to your Presentation score.

Define your terms. Provide subtitles, if you must. Think about it: Anthony Burgess’ A CLOCKWORK ORANGE would have been well-nigh incomprehensible without the glossary in the back, wouldn’t it?

And please don’t make the mistake of thinking that using lots of jargon makes the book come across as smarter. Judges — yes, and most agents and editors, too — are generally quite aware that it is significantly harder to describe a complex process in simple terms than in obscure ones. The appeal of Stephen Hawking’s A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME was not merely the platform of the writer, which is undoubtedly impressive, but the fact that he was able to describe theoretical physics in layman’s language.

In a nonfiction piece, you need to make sure that every plank of your argument is sound and comprehensible to someone who knows NOTHING about your subject matter. Literally nothing, as in perhaps never even suspected that such a topic might exist. This assumption may seem like an invitation to talk down to the reader, but actually, it’s just realistic. While you may be writing for a target market crammed to the brim with specialists in your area (or people who think they are, always a prime market for books), a new writer can NEVER assume preexisting expertise on the part of a judge, agent, or editor.

This is true, amazingly enough, even if you are writing on a subject that has already been well-traveled in the popular press. You may be writing about the single most common social phenomenon in the country, but that does not mean that NYC-based publishing types will have heard of it. Publishing is a rarefied world, in a sense quite provincial, insofar as its denizens tend to be very much absorbed in their own culture, often to the exclusion of others. It’s a complex and extraordinarily diverse culture, yes, but still, an inward-looking one.

If statistics would be helpful to conveying how large the market for your book is, or how common a phenomenon is, go ahead and include them in the synopsis. Trust me on this one — I’ve seen books about conditions that affect 20% of the population of the United States dismissed by publishing professionals as appealing to only a tiny niche market.

Coherence problems are not always a matter of unduly presuming familiarity with the subject matter and not explaining enough, however. Unanswered questions can cause coherence difficulties as well, particularly if those questions arise fairly naturally from the action of the piece: why, for instance, does a character in a horror story wander, alone and unarmed, into a house she knows to be haunted? Why didn’t the family in THE AMITYVILLE HORROR just invoke the state’s lemon law and cancel its contract to buy the house? And why oh why doesn’t the local bored housewife in a thriller take up crochet or gardening, instead of lusting after the town’s newest stubble-encrusted drifter?

Remember, “because the plot requires it” is never a valid answer. Give the reader some sense of your characters’ motivations.

Yes, I know — in a contest, where you might be allowed to show only a single chapter of a 400-page novel, you may not have room to establish motivations for every major character. You can in the synopsis, though, and you certainly can show off your ability to convey motivation in the actions the protagonist takes in that first chapter. Don’t underestimate how much handling small events well will demonstrate your acumen in handling the bigger ones later on in the book.

A quick aside about entering the first chapter of a novel in a contest: this is an arena where following that shopworn advice about taking your protagonist through the steps of a Jungian hero’s journey can really cost you.

You’ve heard of this plotting device, right? Screenwriters have inundated us with it since the success of the original STAR WARS; in recent years, many advice-givers on the writers’ conference circuit have been advocating it as well. The hero starts out in his (almost never her), normal life, hears the call of a challenge, gets drawn into a challenge, meets friends and advisors along the way… and so forth, for three distinct acts. It’s not a bad structure, although it has gotten a bit common for my taste.

The problem is, this structure more or less requires that the opening of the book (or, more commonly, movie) open with the protagonist’s mundane life, before the excitement of the drama begins. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that — but it does tend to lead to a first chapter heavy on background and light on action. And the problem with THAT in a contest is that the first chapter is usually all the judges see.

I’ve written about this before, and recently, so I won’t expend energy now retracing the many, many reasons to start your contest entries and agency submissions with a bang. Suffice it to say that in this instance, sticking too rigidly to a predetermined structural formula may leave you with little action for which to provide motivation.

Okay, back to unmotivated actions. As you may see from the examples above, the problem of unexplained motivation is another area where I think many writers — and readers, too — have had their senses of proportion semi-permanently twisted by television and movies, so much so that they sometimes forget that characters NEED motivations in order to take action.

One of the surest signs that a story has fallen into a cliché is when the story gives the impression that there is no need to provide a motivation: in a cliché, the motivation is just assumed. Few of us actually have a thing for real-life drifters, for instance, at least not so much that we instantly fling ourselves into torrid affairs with them a few days after they first slouch into sight, yet we’re evidently willing to believe that characters in film will.

And not just in film noir, either: this scenario described is essentially what happens in SIDEWAYS. These two wine-tasters drifted into town, and the local bored women took up with them without knowing anything, really, about their backgrounds… having grown up in California wine country, I can assure you that the fine folks who pour sips at the local wineries are not prone to flinging themselves at every drifter who asks for a refill. Unless a lot has changed since I left town.

The constant barrage of this kind of story has indelibly stained most people’s sense of the plausible, but you’re better than that, aren’t you? You’re not going to be seduced by this charming willingness on the part of the audience to suspend disbelief into believing that they don’t need to establish realistic motivations for your characters, will you?

The judges of literary contests are hoping that you will resist the siren songs of cliché and unmotivated action with all of your might. To put it another way, in print and to professional eyes, unmotivated action comes across as literary laziness. Scads of points lost this way.

Plausibility is a coherence problem, at base; memoirs and fact-based novels are particularly susceptible to plausibility problems. Yet another writing truism: just because something really happened doesn’t necessarily mean it is plausible. It is the writer’s job to make it SEEM plausible.

Once, in college, my roommate and I managed to adopt a wandering Irish theatre company accidentally. A long story, and not a very plausible one: believe it or not, we just came home one day to find that the college officials had given the traveling thespians the keys to our dorm suite. Not very plausible, is it? Yet true. Being sensitive to issues of plausibility, I have never written about it, because it’s rather difficult to explain why we didn’t just throw them out — or why I suddenly felt compelled to cook Thanksgiving dinner (my first time as cook) for 16 total strangers. (As I recall, it had something to do with the fact that none of them had ever before experienced the bliss that is lemon meringue pie.)

To a contest judge, it doesn’t matter whether a depicted event really happened (can you hear James Frey breathing a sigh of relief?), but whether the author has made it feel real to the reader. If not, off with the Presentation points.

Tomorrow, I shall talk about one of the most effective Presentation point boosters in the writer’s tool bag: humor. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Today, I am going to begin to talk about the final formal category of contest scoring, Presentation. The Presentation category is where, for instance, a judge might evaluate whether a fiction entry engages in too much flashback, or whether a nonfiction essay speaks too much in generalities rather than concrete examples. It is where the judge will ask herself: “What is the central problem of this piece? Is it well drawn? If this is a first chapter, do I have any idea where the novel is taking us in order to solve the problem?”

Put another way, in order to evaluate a manuscript for this category, the judge must ask herself how well she thinks the entry says what the author wants it to say.

As in other categories, while how well a problem is presented or an argument laid out is very much in the eye of the beholder, there are technical criteria that judges consult. In general, though, they concentrate on a single question — is it coherent? — and work outward from there. The harder it is for a judge to figure out what is going on in an entry, the lower its presentation score will be.

This is the single biggest reason not to enter an excerpt from the middle of a book, or splice together an entry from non-consecutive chapters. Even if the contest’s rules say you may do this, the mere fact of beginning anywhere but the beginning signals the judges that (a) the book is probably not finished and (b) that the author may have some personal doubts about the coherence of the opening. It invites speculation about motivation — which almost never ends well for the entrant.

Beyond the coherence issue, there are the small matters of how evidence and details are, well, presented — which is why a lot of writers confuse Presentation with Mechanics, or even Technique. The fault for this confusion lies not entirely with the writers, but in those who give advice to writers: outside the contest milieu, the issues of the Mechanics category — such as typeface, margins, proofreading, even paper choice — are often described as presentation problems. Within the context of a contest, however, Presentation is more about structure, argumentation, and detail than getting your margins in the right place.

The single place where entries are most likely to lose presentation points is the synopsis. Mostly, as I pointed out back in January, contest synopses simply SCREAM at the judges that the writer considers having to summarize the plot or argument of his book an intolerable and unreasonable burden. Resentment shouts from practically every line, which certainly does not make the book sound as though it would be enjoyable to read. Sometimes, this resentment is carried to such an extreme that an entry omits to include a synopsis at all, or merely provides a single-page one plus a table of contents. Instant loss of almost all presentation points.

It is also astonishingly common for the included synopsis to be nothing but a marketing blurb, a phantom jacket blurb for an as-yet-to-be-published book. While it is indeed useful for judges, agents, and editors to have some idea of who the target market is for a proposed book, the synopsis is not generally considered the proper place to talk about it, at least for fiction. (In a contest that asks you to specify target market, put the information on the title page.)

I have written at length in this forum before about how to write a synopsis, and I shall probably write about it again, so I shall not go into the nitty-gritty here. Suffice it to say, the MINIMUM requirements for a successful synopsis include, for fiction, telling the story of the plot in such a way as to indicate that the author has some skill as a storyteller; a nonfiction synopsis should give a brief, coherent indication of the argument to be made in the book and how the author proposes to prove it, also in a style that indicates the book will be a good read.

The operative concepts here are SUMMARY and BOOK THAT A READER MIGHT CONCEIVABLY ENJOY READING. The puff-piece method of synopsis generally omits the summary entirely, preferring instead to tell the reader (in this case, the judge) that there are 47 million Gen Xers, many of whom will feel resonance with the book’s argument; it’s great if you can work that information in to a NF synopsis ALONG with an overview of the case you are making in the book, but it is never a substitute.

Nor is an outline (or, worse still, a bulleted list — and yes, Virginia, I HAVE seen this done in many contest entries) ever an adequate substitute for a well-argued synopsis, because this method gives absolutely no indication of whether the author can WRITE or not.

I know I told you last time that if you take nothing else away from my blog, you should take away the importance of not editing your own work on a computer screen, but today, I am going to add a second commandment (drum roll, please):

Thou shalt regard EVERY line of EVERYTHING you submit to a contest, agency, or publishing house as a writing sample.

No exceptions. Your goal in a contest, as well as in a submission to an agent or editor, is to convince the judges that you can write well. Exceptionally well, in fact, well enough to render it a pleasure as well as a duty to recognize your talent with a place in the finalist category. So when you provide outlines instead of straightforward English prose, or a table of contents instead of a thoughtful exposition of your ideas, you are taking pages and pages of opportunity to prove your writing acumen and simply setting fire to them.

Using the synopsis and/or introduction as marketing copy does give you an opportunity to show you can write, true, but let’s face it, ad copy is not generally considered the highest form of mortal self-expression. Think about it — did your high school English teacher hold up “Coke adds life” to you as an example of prose to emulate? Did your first screenwriting instructor sigh over the persuasive magic of Ricardo Montalban’s poetic musings over the fine Corinthian leather of the Chrysler Cordova, pensively noting that we would never see the like of THAT kind of Shakespearean passion again in our lifetimes?

What ad copy does teach writers to do, alas, is exaggerate. To speak in gross overgeneralizations for a moment, it is HUGELY common for synopses (and first chapters) in nonfiction books to boast about the vital importance of the book the reader holds in her trembling hand. (Do my aged eyes see before me yet another book on the differences between men and women that proposes to solve the battle of the sexes in 250 pages — and that without once addressing the problem of pay differentials?) This, in fact, is the book that the world has been waiting for since the beginning of time. Every incident in my life led directly and inevitably to my writing this book. Honest. Every North American between the ages of 10 and 72 needs to read it within the next year, or I can’t be responsible for the consequences.

In nonfiction, a correlated tendency is to present the book’s argument as if it were the missing link, the single set of logic that will end world hunger, reconcile those who hate one another, and render such minor inconveniences as civil wars and border disputes things of the past. I wish I had a quarter for every first page that told me my life would be changed by this book — because, then, my life would have been changed by all of those books.

I would send you all a postcard from Tahiti, I promise.

The trick here is to avoid hyperbole, particularly in describing your intended audience. Frankly, there is NO book that appeals to everyone — and yes, entrants do actually make that claim fairly regularly in contest submissions. Even if you have identified your target demographic with praiseworthy precision, no reasonable contest judge, agent, or editor is seriously going to believe that everyone in the demographic is going to buy your book, no matter how apt it is. So don’t claim that they will.

Why should such claims harm you in the Presentation category? Because they betray, just as incorrect book categories do, a certain lack of familiarity with the lingua franca of the publishing world. No one in the publishing world would seriously argue that everyone in a demographic would buy a book, even about books that large percentage of a given demographic actually did buy. Remember, contest judges want to reward authors whom they believe can take the win and parlay it into publishing gold, not those who do not yet know the ropes.

When in Rome, speak as the Romans do.

And take my word for it, if you use language to describe your target market that reads like marketing copy, it will cost you many points in the Presentation category. A great big red flag: a demographic statement that includes the phrase “anybody who” or “everybody that,” as in, “anybody who knows and loves a cancer victim will want to buy this book,” or (heaven help us), “everybody that votes in presidential elections needs to have this information.” It doesn’t matter if you think it is true: it will come across as ill-informed boasting (yes, even if it’s true; sorry about that), and will be graded down accordingly.

Tomorrow, I shall delve into more of the nitty-gritty of the Presentation category. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Yesterday, I went on a rampage about the difference between basic good, clear writing (as expected as a minimum by judges, agents, and editors) and personal style. I argued that these professional readers are only going to give you brownie points for your writing style after your manuscript has proven itself to have surpassed that fundamental bar of correctly-formatted, grammatically impeccable, clear writing. The rest is gravy, but without the meat, professionals seldom bother to notice the deliciousness of the sauce.

Today, I am going to discuss how contest judges evaluate the gravy. Since literary style is so much a matter of personal taste, do these evaluations really reflect much more than the judges’ individual preferences and reading habits?

In a word, yes. There are technical elements of style that can be broken out and rated comparatively, over and above the base-level criteria.

One of these is pacing. Have you ever heard an agent or editor joke at a conference, “I’ve never read a first-time author’s work that went too quickly?” There is a reason they find this funny: most submissions slow to a standstill after a page or two. In a way, this is a boon to them; it gives them an excuse to stop reading and move on with their busy schedules.

Partially, spicy openings followed by tepid pages are the fault of the agents and editors themselves: have they not been telling us all for years and years that far and away the most important part of a submission is the first page, or even the first paragraph? So we all write our little hearts out to make those initial lines sing. Unfortunately, not every writer treats the rest of the first chapter, say, or the first 50 pages as a writing sample; after the initial push of excellence, the pace slows. Writers like stunning endings, though, so the pace tends to pick up toward the end of the book. Call it the little tip we give ourselves for finishing.

The result is a phenomenon the pros call “sagging in the middle.” When confronted with a book (or first 50 pages, or first chapter) that sags in the middle, agents and editors report feeling cheated, as if all of that fancy writing on the first and last pages were some sort of camouflaging trick writers used to fool them into thinking the books in question are better than they are.

Rejection almost invariably follows.

In contests, judges get to see only the first chapter of a book, so they are treated to post-intro sag. It is disappointing, to see an obviously talented writer back off from the intensity of a fine beginning. It may not be fair, any more than the agents and editors’ response to sag is fair, but sloping-off pace tends to be rated pretty harshly by judges. Sorry.

Then, too, there are the entries that never really get off the ground, or that wait until page three to start. These, too, are pacing problems, and the Technique category is where authors are penalized for them.

If you are in doubt about your pacing, try reading your work aloud to a third party. Mark on the manuscript whenever your listener starts to fidget; there may well be a pacing problem there. You can replicate this experiment less reliably on your own, by reading your submission straight through in a single sitting, and marking every place where your eyes left the page, even for a moment, without the outside stimulus of something dramatic, like a fire alarm or neighborhood insurrection. This experiment is valuable, because it will show you precisely how an unclear or ambiguous sentence stops a reader in her tracks, puzzling out meaning.

What you cannot do to catch pacing problems is read your work on a computer screen. Research has shown (how’s THAT for a vague statement?) that the average reader skims 75% faster on screen than on paper — it’s just does not give you a valid sense of actual book-in-hand reading rates. Long-time readers of this blog, let’s all say it together: read your own work OUT LOUD and IN HARD COPY before you even think about submitting it to professional readers.

If you really want to be sophisticated in your pacing, try a trick of the trade that contest judges love: at exciting moments, have the sentence structure shorter than at more meditative times. That way, the rhythm of the punctuation echoes the increased heart rate of the characters. Nifty, eh?

Another ratable aspect of technique is running order. Would the story have been more compelling told in a different order? Did the narrative stop dead because of the insertion of a paragraph of background information? Is the author telling too much, or too little?

In a nonfiction piece, running order is even more important than for fiction. Are the planks of the argument presented in an order that makes sense, where each one builds on the one before, leading up to a convincing conclusion? Are the examples frequent and appropriate enough? Did the author slow down the argument by over-emphasizing points that could have been glossed over quickly, to move on to more important material?

And so forth. Often, contest judges respond even more harshly to problems in running order than agents and editors do, because unlike the latter, judges cannot just draw a box around the misplaced part and scrawl in the margin, “Move to X, two pages back.”

At the risk of sounding like your 9th-grade English teacher, if you are in ANY doubt about the running order of your NF argument, take a blank sheet of paper and sit down with your manuscript. Read it straight through. As you make each major point in the text, write a summary sentence on the piece of paper, in order. After you finish reading, go back over that list: taken together, in that order, does the argument make sense?

In a fiction piece, it is a little more difficult to ferret out problems for yourself; an extra pair of eyes can be very helpful here. However, if you are left to your own resources, try outlining the plot. On a blank piece of paper, not dissimilar to the one described above, write down all of the major plot points in order. After you have a complete list, go back and ask yourself about each, “Why did this happen?” If the answer is along the lines of, “Because the plot required it,” rather than for reasons of characterization, you might want to recheck the running order; something is probably amiss, if you can’t justify an occurrence otherwise.

The final major component of Technique is freshness. Freshness is one of those concepts that people talk about a lot, without ever defining with any precision. A fresh story is generally not an absolutely original one, but a new twist on an old: BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, for instance, is certainly not the first tragedy ever written about socially frowned-upon love, or even the first one involving either a cowboy or two men. The combination of all of these elements made for a fresh story.

It is interesting that when people in the industry talk about freshness, they usually resort to other media for examples. WEST SIDE STORY was a fresh take on ROMEO AND JULIET; RENT was a fresh retelling of LA BOHÉME, which was in itself a retelling of an earlier book; almost any episode of any sitcom originally aired in December is a fresh take on A CHRISTMAS CAROL. Or maybe not so fresh.

The point is, folks in the publishing industry just love the incorporation of contemporary elements into classic stories. There is just no other way to explain industry enthusiasm for BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY, which reproduced the plot of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE so completely that many of the characters’ names remained the same. I’ve even heard publishing professionals describe THE COLOR PURPLE as THE UGLY DUCKLING with racial issues added, which I consider something of a stretch. (Besides, THE UGLY DUCKLING in its original form is absolutely about race, isn’t it?)

So in evaluating an entry for the Technique category, the judge will ask herself: if the story is a familiar one, is it being told in a new voice? If the story is surprising and new, are there enough familiar stylistic elements that the reader feels grounded and trusts that the plot will unfold in a dramatically satisfying manner? (And yes, they will probably ask these questions even if your entry is SF and takes place on Planet Targ.)

As you may see, even in rating an area as potentially nebulous as style, the judge will often adhere to (or be given outright) a set of formal evaluation criteria. By asking yourself a few of these questions in advance, before you submit your entry, you can often find ways to raise your work in the rankings.

Tomorrow, I shall discuss the Presentation category, which encompasses more than merely following the formatting rules of the contest and the industry. It is where the ta da! element comes in, especially for nonfiction entries.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Happy Ides of March! Caesar, beware!

Today, I shall tackle the difficult subject of how technique tends to be scored in literary contests. In many ways, this is the toughest category for which to set standards, partially because every judge — just like every writer, every agent, and every editor in North America — was taught something slightly different about what makes a paragraph well-written.

The problem is, not only do we all THINK we are right about this — we all actually ARE right about it.

Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? It should sound particularly odd to those of you who have taken a whole lot of writing classes or attended writers’ conferences. There, you were probably told that there is actually not a whole lot of variation amongst different styles of good writing, just what each particular market will embrace. Good writing, writers are given to understand, is good writing, across venues.

Translation: standard format is standard format across venues. Not a whole lot of variation there: specific structures, norms for spelling and grammar, preferred typefaces. And, of course, clear writing that says what the writer wants it to say AND is easily comprehended by others.

Go back and read that last paragraph again. It’s awfully important: these, my friends, are the minimum standards for professional writing. If a contest entry (or agency submission, or publishing house submission) does not come up to this standard, it will invariably score low in the Technique category.

Beyond these basics lies style. I cannot stress this enough: no amount of personal flair or innovative insight will permit a technically problematic manuscript to score well in the Technique category. Scoring rules are almost invariably set up to prevent it. So let us talk about base-level good writing before we discuss personal style, because frankly, the basics are where most points are lost in the Technique category.

Writers quibble a lot amongst themselves over whether being a good writer can be taught. I have always thought that this question is formulated incorrectly: it really should be whether style can be taught, or whether talent can be learned. Certainly, the mechanics and forms of the base level of good writing can be taught, or at any rate learned: it is hard to imagine someone absolutely new to the craft spontaneously electing to set up a manuscript in accordance with standard format. And everyone can learn to be a clearer writer through feedback.

While this base level of good writing may not seem particularly ambitious, it is a truism of the industry that the VAST majority of submissions agencies and publishing houses receive do not rise to this level. This is where the often-draconian policy of automatically rejecting manuscripts with technical problems comes from; writers with promising style, unfortunately, often get caught in this net as well.

How does this happen? Well, the formatting is the tiresome part, right? Most writers are in the biz for the self-expression, not the hours of bringing their thought into lockstep with the rules of the industry. Those who are in it for the money are either incredibly lucky or have yet to notice that writers suffer from an even higher unemployment rate than actors, which is indeed saying something. Every time some well-meaning novice asks an agent at a conference, “So, what kind of an advance can a book like…” (insert here hypothetical description of what is quite obviously to professional ears a description of the speaker’s book) …expect to receive?”, everyone on the agent panel cringes, picturing just how steep the questioner’s learning curve is likely to be. But I digress.

Since for most of us, getting our thoughts, stories, and worldviews out there is the primary goal of writing a book, many writers skip over the technical acumen-gaining step and move directly to unfettered self-expression — and then are surprised and frustrated when the resulting book has difficulty finding an agent, getting published, or winning contests. Concentrating almost exclusively on the self-expressive capacity of the book, we tend to read rejection as personal, rather than professional. Naturally, it is painful.

However, it’s usually a misunderstanding of what actually occurred. Ask any publishing industry professional, and they will tell you: 99% of rejections are technically-based; the rejection usually isn’t of the submitter’s style or worldview, for the simple reason that those are not considerations unless the basic signs of good writing — in the sense of professional writing — are there.

This can be a very empowering realization. Once a writer grasps the difference between technically good writing and stylistic good writing, rejections become less a personal insult than a signal that there may be technical problems with how she is presenting her writing. The question turns from, “Why do they hate me?” to “What can I do to make this submission read better?”

Yeah, I know: it’s not much of a promotion, emotionally. But at least when the question is framed in the latter manner, there is something the writer can DO about it.

This is also true of contest scoring, particularly in the Technique category, where clarity is the sine qua non. Technical problems usually make it very, very easy for judges to rule out entries; as I mentioned last time, judges agonize over rating the relatively small percentage of entries that reach and surpass the basic clarity bar, not over the majority of entries that do not reach it.

So without a doubt, absolutely the best thing you can do to increase your score in this category is to make sure that your entry is crystal-clear. Pass it under other eyes, preferably those of other writers, people who both know basic good writing when they see it AND have some idea how to fix it. A writers’ group is ideal for this.

What is not ideal is showing your work only to your kith and kin while you are trying to catch technical problems and increase its clarity. It needs to be seen by human eyes that do not belong to oneself, one’s mother, one’s partner, or one’s best friend. Longtime readers of this blog, chant with me now: as marvelous as these first readers may be, they are unlikely to give one unbiased feedback — and only unbiased, knowledgeable feedback is going to help hoist your work up over the professional bar.

There is another reason to go to emotionally independent sources for your feedback: you will not feel compelled to take their advice. Lovers, relatives, and friends are less likely to understand your book as a professional endeavor, a product being perfected prior to marketing, than as an extension of you, the person they love — which in turn makes it harder, if they are the primary first readers of your work, to keep that preliminary goal of professional presentation firmly in mind.

Lest you think that this is an easy thing for a professional writer and editor to recommend to those who may not have literary connections, I do practice as I preach here. I have built a small circle of first readers, people that I know for a fact have good literary judgment and will tell me the truth when my work falters. My boyfriend — a lovely person and a sterling intellect in his own right — is not allowed to read my first drafts; the closest he gets to the early stages of my work is when I read him freshly-minted comic scenes aloud, to see where and whether he laughs. Apart from that, his role in my life is not as literary critic, but part of my support system, as is sensible and appropriate.

If I seem to be harping on the necessity for impersonal feedback, it is because every time I have served as a judge in a literary contest, I have been struck by just how obvious it is that most entries have never been seen by human eyes other than the author’s. This sad fact really does stack the deck against those entries, because clarity is so heavily weighted in judging.

Tomorrow, I shall discuss other aspects of the Technique category, such as pacing and freshness. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

I am going to move on to the technical parts of contest judging, the Technique, Presentation, and Mechanics categories. To the uninitiated, these all can sound very much alike, so I shall take them one at a time. The most important thing to understand right off the bat is that they all are, irrevocably, detail-oriented.

It seems to come as a surprise to a lot of entrants that much of contest judging turns on tiny details, but actually, it’s true of agency and editorial decisions as well. It may appear silly that having a slug line in the wrong place (centered in the middle of the footer, for instance, instead of right- or left-justified in the header), would weigh heavily enough in a reasonable reader’s consideration that it might knock an entry out of finalist consideration or prevent an agency’s first reader from asking to read the rest of the book, but it does happen.

Why? Well, contests are really intended to reward manuscripts that do not require significant additional work; agents and editors prefer to see manuscripts as close to print-ready as possible. From their points of view, rejecting a well-written but unprofessionally formatted work is akin to a fisherman throwing back a too-small fish: they would like to catch it again after it has grown a little more.

And no, as nearly as I can tell, not one professional reader sits up nights, gnawing his fingernails and worrying that he’s let the next great American novel slip away over a technicality. The pool of applicants is simply too large; if he misses one, he reasons, there will always be another. It’s like applying to an Ivy League school: Harvard could fill every year’s freshman class with applicants with near-perfect SAT scores from Manhattan alone, so how much consideration do you think the admission office gives an application whose essays were obviously not proofread? Or ones that did not adhere to the application’s requirements?

Exactly.

Similarly, in a contest — particularly a highly competitive one, such as the PNWA’s — there are pretty much always many more entries from talented writers than there are spaces on the finalist rolls in each category. However, as I have mentioned before, a good 80% of entries will contain at least one major contest rule violation, and roughly 90% will feature non-standard format. With so many other talented writers to reward with precious finalist status, most judges are not going to worry a great deal about the promising writers who have yet to learn how to format a manuscript properly; they want to recognize and laud the writers who are ready to hit the big time.

This is one reason that I advise writers to enter contests where entrants get actual feedback on their entries: if you’re the fish that’s thrown back, you would like to know why, so you can grow big enough to stay in the net next time.

The major exception to this technical selectivity (and I hesitate even to mention it) is the kind of contest where they tell every entrant that she has won, and for only $500, she can attend an award ceremony where she’ll be given a ribbon! Or for only $200, she will be able to buy a book with her poem in it, along with 4700 others! This kind of contest, much like a vanity press, makes its money from stoking the egos of submitters.

Which is fine, as long as everyone concerned realizes that it’s a non-competitive situation. Such contests, however, are seldom upfront about this fact, for it would make what they are offering for their $500 or $200 appear less valuable, so do be careful about where you enter your work. In a legitimately competitive contest, details will be scrutinized closely and scored accordingly — which makes those contests worthwhile to win.

The Mechanics category is where the least subjective of these details are evaluated. Is the punctuation correct? Is the spelling? (You would be astonished at how few contest entries appear to have been adequately proofread.) Are the margins as they should be? Does the entry adhere to the contest’s formatting rules?

While spelling and grammatical errors can be a matter of mere oversight, not adhering to contest rules is generally a matter of not having read them — and accordingly, these latter violations tend to be scored more harshly than proofreading problems. Often contests will tell judges to mark down habitual mistakes and consistent grammatical errors — punctuation that reveals that the writer is not sure how to use a possessive correctly, for instance, a surprisingly common phenomenon — more heavily than ones that appear to have been inadvertent, single-instance lapses. The hope is that the writer who does not know the rules will go out and take a writing class, but that the inadvertent error-maker will simply proofread better in future.

As nearly as I can tell, there is a single, easily fixed reason that so many entries do not adhere to requested contest formats: in the book categories, at least, most entrants apparently just print up the first chapter of their book and submit it as is, without taking the time to check whether its current format even remotely resembles what the contest organizers have seen fit to specify. This scares contest judges a little, frankly, because almost invariably, the basic formats requested by contests are slight variations on standard format — which means that the oddball manuscripts the judges see are being seen by agents and editors, too.

Again, if you have any doubt about this, or are clinging to the atavistic notion that the publishing industry cares only about writing quality, and not about format — please, for your own sake, volunteer to be a first-round judge in a competitive literary contest as soon as possible. After reading just a few entries, it will become abundantly apparent to you why the professionals insist upon standardization: there is so very much variation in what is submitted that comparison would be impossible without the imposition of some rules.

To give one common example (and one that I have actually seen get contest entries disqualified), many writers have picked up from printed books the practice of not indenting the first paragraph of a chapter, or they have (again, having seen this done in printed books?) decided that each paragraph should be indented either 3 or 7 spaces, instead of the standard 5. But (and regular readers of this blog should stop up their ears now, having heard this rant before) MANUSCRIPT FORMAT AND BOOK FORMAT DIFFER IN MANY SIGNIFICANT WAYS. Formatting a manuscript (or an entry) like a book does NOT make it look like a book, to professional or judging eyes; it merely makes it plain that the writer does not know much about the publishing industry.

It may seem a trifle silly that a judge (or agent, or editor) would take umbrage over something so simple as a couple of spaces missing at the front of a paragraph, but think about it: all literary contests have page limits for entries, right? When an entry does not indent the first paragraph, the writer gets five extra characters; when indentation is truncated for every paragraph, that’s two extra characters available per paragraph. While that may not seem like much, over the course of a 20-page entry, it might well add up to an extra paragraph or two of additional writing space for the fudging entrant. When someone is trying to make a long chapter conform to space requirements, that’s a lot of leeway. Similarly, an extra-long habitual indent, like an extra-large typeface, might be a means of making a scanty manuscript appear longer.

Thus, even if (as is generally the case) an entrant made this formatting choice out of simple ignorance of standard format, a judge may be instructed to read it as a deliberate attempt to cheat. It may be unfair, but it does happen.

This is not 9th-grade history class, people. Spelling, grammar, and format do count, and no one gets to fiddle with type size (or print at 98%) in order to fit within the stated guidelines. If you try it, I can guarantee that your entry will lose points in the Mechanics category.

Another popular way to lose points in the Mechanics category is through too-light photocopying or printing. Just as when you submit work to an agent or editor, every page of a contest entry should be clearly printed in dark ink on brilliantly white paper. Yes, this does discriminate against poorer entrants, who may not have access to good printers, but then, so do job interviews: it’s significantly more difficult for people with smaller incomes to scare up a suit in order to make a good first impression on a prospective boss than it is for more affluent people.

As I believe I may have mentioned before, I don’t run the universe, so I can’t address the underlying socio-economic injustices that may be leading entrants to mail in fuzzy photocopies. If you want to win a contest, you will need to dress up your work. Suffice it to say: if you are able to pay $50 for an entry fee, it is worth the extra few dollars to have decently readable copies made.

Long-time readers of this blog may recognize many of these Mechanics factors: they are essentially the provisions of standard format. (If you are in ANY doubt about the strictures of standard manuscript format, rush right to my post of February 19th for a refresher.) It just goes to show that I have been telling the truth all along: it really will save you time in the long run if you just adhere to standard format from day one of writing your manuscript. You may have to tweak it slightly in order to make it conform with the formatting regulations of wackier contests, but seldom much.

Tomorrow, I shall move on to the Presentation and Technique categories. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

I’m feeling a bit stuffy-headed today, perhaps due to the fact that the great big crabapple tree in my backyard has suddenly burst into magnificent masses of pink blooms. Very beautiful, very pollen-laden.

It reminds me of the small town — a village, really, ensconced within an agricultural preserve — where I grew up, in the Napa Valley. (Note to outsiders: PLEASE don’t refer to the entire area as Napa; it makes the locals apoplectic. Napa is a city; the Napa Valley is the winegrowing region.) Tourists overrun the Napa Valley in the autumn, when the grapevines sport leaves of many colors, but my favorite time there has always been the early spring, this time of year, when the vines are dormant and the vineyards are full of knee-high fluorescent yellow mustard flowers. Acres and acres of neon brilliance. The local truism runs that if you don’t suffer from pollen allergies then, you never will.

Because I am inherently contrary, I never suffered from pollen allergies until years later, when I moved to Washington. Go figure.

I bring this up, not merely because my head is stuffy, but as an apt metaphor for today’s topic. Authorial voice can’t really be taught (although there are writing teachers who would disagree with me on that point): it arises organically, often after years of cultivation. It’s extraordinarily rare that an author’s distinctive personal voice shows up in her first writing projects, except perhaps in flashes. No, for most good writers, one day, after seemingly endless writing, a personal voice abruptly emerges and takes over the narration, like all of those crabapple and mustard flowers bursting into bloom.

And like those early spring flowers, a strong, original voice will not appeal to all readers. The more distinctive the voice, the greater the risk, in a way — it can irritate in a way that a merely clear, pleasant voice will not. So how on earth can a contest judge rate voice on anything but personal preference?

Basically, by concentrating on the appropriateness of the chosen voice for the story it is telling. Not all voices fit with all material. At the moment, I work in three distinct voices: in descending order of perkiness, my blog voice, my fiction voice, and my memoir voice. (My memoir is funny, too, but as a great memoirist once told me, part of the art of the memoir is feeling sorry enough for yourself NOT to make light of your personal tragedies, for there is your subject matter.) If I used my memoir voice here, in discussing the sometimes-grim realities of how the publishing industry treats writers, I would depress us all into a stupor. Because my goal is to motivate you all to present your work’s best face to the world, I use a cheerleading voice.

Minion, hand me my megaphone, please.

One of the great things about gaining a broad array of writing experience is learning how to switch voices. I’ve written back label copy for wine bottles, for heaven’s sake, as well as political platforms and fashion articles. Obviously, tone, vocabulary choice, and cadence needed to be different for all of these venues. I firmly believe that all of my current voices owe a great deal to this experience, just as playing a lot of different roles in high school or college drama classes might give a person poise in real life.

One writing experience in particular prepared me for dealing with the horrible in a light-hearted way. Right after I graduated from college, I landed a job writing and researching for the LET’S GO series of travel guides. The series’ method of garnering material, at least at the time, was to pay a very young, very naïve person a very small amount of money to backpack around a given area. The job was jam-packed with irony: I was supposed to do restaurant and motel reviews, for instance, but my per diem was so small that I slept in a tent six nights per week and lived on ramen cooked over a campfire. That sort of thing.

However, the tone of the guides is very gung-ho, can-do kids having the time of their lives. But when one is visiting the tenth municipal museum of the week — you know, the kind containing a clay diorama of a pioneer settlement, a tiny, antique wedding dress displayed on a dressmaker’s form, and four dusty arrowheads– it is hard to maintain one’s excitement. Yet I was expected to produce roughly 60 pages of copy per week, much of it written on a picnic table by candlelight.

I can tell you the precise moment when I found my travel guide voice. It was the evening of July 3, a few weeks into my assignment. The date was important, because my publisher had not yet sent my overdue paycheck, and the banks would be closed the next day. I had precisely $23.15 in my pocket; it was raining so hard that I could barely find the motel I was supposed to be checking out, and when I stepped into the lobby, I was informed that the management did not allow outsiders to work there.

“Excuse me?” I said. “I just want a room for the night.”

The desk clerk was so astonished at the request that she ran and fetched the manager. Apparently, no one in recent memory had wanted to rent a room there for more than an hour at a stretch. The clerk did not even know what to charge.

I ran to the nearest pay phone (the room was phoneless) and called my editor in Boston. “I have $8.15 to my name,” I told him, while the rain noisily drenched the phone booth, “the banks are closed tomorrow, and you have sent me to a house of ill repute. What precisely do you want me to do?”

“Improvise?” he suggested.

I elected to find a campground that night, so I spent Independence Day huddled in a rapidly leaking tent, scribbling away furiously. I had found my travel writing voice, a sodden, exhausted traveler so astonished by the stupidity around her that she found it amusing. My readers — and my warm, dry editor back in Boston — ate it up.

I told you this story not merely because it is true (which, alas, it is; ah, the glamour of the writing life!), but to make a point about authorial voice. A contest judge would look at the story above and try to assess whether another type of voice might have conveyed the story better, as well as whether I maintained the voice consistently throughout. How would a less personal voice have conveyed the same information? Would it have come across better in the third person, or if I pretended the incident had happened to a close friend of mine?

Appropriateness of viewpoint tends to weigh heavily in judges’ assessments, and deservedly so. Many, many contest entries either do not maintain the same voice throughout the piece (apparently unintentionally) or tell the story in an absolutely straightforward manner, with no personal narrative quirks at all. So the same story might end up reading like a police report:

A 22-year-old woman, soaked to the skin, walks into a motel lobby. The clerk asks her what she wants; she replies that she wants a room for the night. When the clerk tells her they do not do that, she responds with incredulity. The clerk gets the manager, who repeats the information. Noting the 7″ x 10″ wall of pornographic videotapes to her right and the women in spandex and gold lame huddled outside under the awning, flagging down passing cars, the young woman determines that she might not be in the right place. She telephones her editor, who agrees.

Not the apex of colorful, is it? A contest judge would read this second account and think, “Gee, this story has potential, but the viewpoint is not maximizing the humor of the story.” She would then subtract points from the Voice category, and rightly so.

One pet peeve of contest judges, as well as agents and editors everywhere, is when the narrator reports things s/he could not possibly know. This is VERY common in first-person narratives — where necessarily, all the reader should hear about is what the narrator can observe or recall. So why is the reader hearing other characters’ thoughts, or seeing incidents that occurred when the narrator was not present?

I blame television and movies for this. Just as their limitations have told writers that all human experience should be conveyed merely through the audible and the visible, leaving out other stimuli except as verbally described by the characters, they have also instructed us that where the camera can go, so can the narrator. But in a first-person piece, this logically is not true.

Another technical factor in evaluating voice is consistency, as I mentioned quickly above. Once a narrative choice has been made, does the author stick to it? Are some scenes told in tight third person, where we are hearing the characters’ thoughts and feelings, while some are told in a more impersonal voice, as though observed by a stranger with no prior knowledge of the characters? Judges tend to like to see a point of view held throughout an entry; they will often award points for this, even when they disagree with the choice of voice or point of view.

Judges also take freshness of voice and POV into account. How often has this kind of narrator told this kind of story before? (You wouldn’t believe how many stories were told by the deceased in the years following the success of THE LOVELY BONES, for instance, or how many multiple-perspective narratives followed hot on the heels of THE POISONWOOD BIBLE.)

This is often a tricky one for authors, for there is no denying that being able to say that your work is like a well-known authors is definitely a useful hook for attracting agents’ and editors’ attention. (“My book is Sarah Vowell meets household maintenance!” “My book is BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY set in a rehab clinic!” “The story is SCHINDLER’S LIST, only without the Nazis or all the death!) However, as the late great Mae West liked to point out, while copies may sell in the short term, for the long haul, what is memorable is originality.

Perhaps that is one of the best measures of how effective an entry’s narrative voice was: three days after the judge read it, will he remember how the story was told?

Of course, after all of these factors are taken into account, whether the judge happens to like the narrative voice still weighs heavily into the calculations. That’s inevitable, and there’s nothing a writer can do about it — except to make her narrative voice as strong and true and individually hers as she can possibly can.

Next week, I shall tackle the more nitty-gritty aspects of judging. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

I started yesterday down the long and twisting road of how precisely contest judges judge, discussing the premise category at length. Naturally, every contest on earth hands its judges slightly different criteria for judging, but (in case you missed yesterday’s post) there tend to be five major categories of scoring criteria: Premise, Voice, Presentation, Mechanics, and Technique. Today, I shall wrap up the topic of Premise.

Before I launch, however, a quick aside to those of you following my Novel Project, where I try to give a sense of what it is like to work with a good agent in real time. It’s been just over two weeks — 16 days, to be precise — since my agent and I agreed that it was time to start submitting my novel, THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB, to editors at publishing houses. I sent 8 copies of my manuscript to her precisely two weeks ago, give or take an hour or two, and she received them 9 days ago.

So where are my manuscripts now, you ask? Sitting in my agent’s office, of course.

Surprised? I’m not — but this is an area where most new writers simply don’t speak the same language as their agents, and thus go into agonies of worry about WHY the manuscripts did not get submitted right away. Writers who went to the pointless trouble and expense of overnighting them (something I never do unless the other party is footing the shipping bill; I’ve literally never encountered a situation in the publishing world where USPS Priority Mail didn’t get it there in ample time) end up feeling even worse.

In actual practice, manuscripts seldom pass immediately from agent to editor. (Moral: NYC-based people ALWAYS make their desires sound urgent. Don’t listen to them.) Agents almost never send out manuscripts without pitching them to editors first, and pitching to 8 editors takes time. So does picking which editors would be the best fits for the book — here is where it really pays off to have an agent with good connections, to be able to know who is likely to want a book about the adult lives of kids who grew up on an Oregon commune. Actually, I would be surprised if there weren’t still a few copies sitting in my agent’s office at the end of the month.

I’ll keep you posted, of course. But it just goes to show you, agency and publishing house clocks apparently do not run at the same rate as clocks in writers’ humble domiciles. Which is a nice way of saying: it’s not just you; writers being left in limbo while others judge their work is the nature of the beast. Try not to panic as the days and weeks tick by.

All right, back to the Premise category. In addition to evaluating whether the premise is a marketable one, clearly presented and carried consistently throughout the submitted chapter AND the synopsis, this category is also where judges grade how well the author convinced the reader that this will be a great book. This is not just a matter of how lucidly the premise is presented in the entry; it’s also how quickly the reader is sucked into accepting the premise.

In other words, is there a hook?

As an experienced contest judge and editor, I can tell you outright: the vast majority of entries (and manuscripts, for that matter) do not have a hook. In fact, most entries and manuscripts, even those written by very good writers indeed, tend to do what is known in journalism as burying the lead: they often take a few pages to warm up before starting the book. Or a few paragraphs before getting into the premise in the synopsis.

I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve found a TERRIFIC first line for a novel on page 4. Or 6. Or 17. It’s almost as though some writers are afraid to wow their readers before they get to know them a little. Drink a little wine, maybe go dancing first.

And I’m here to tell you, not only will this practice cost you vital points in the Premise category, it will also harm you in agents’ offices and publishing houses.

To anyone who has read more than a couple of British novels written in the last 30 years, this should be a jaw-dropping observation. Pick up almost any novel that’s won an award in the British Isles recently, and you’ll notice something: by North American standards, the action does not start until at LEAST 10 pages in. Sometimes, it doesn’t start for the first 50 pages. Over there, this rather coy approach to the reader is apparently considered rather stylish.

In the good old U.S.A., however, such a leisurely approach in a first book is considered deadly. (As we all know, established writers have infinitely more leeway.) If nothing dramatic happens in the first 5 pages, chances are very high that the average reader in an agency or publishing house simply will not continue reading. I’ve spoken with agents who say — and I swear I’m not making this up — that if nothing happens on the FIRST page, they stop reading and move on to the next submission.

Yes, yes, it’s grossly unfair. But as I believe I may have pointed out before, if I ran the universe, things would be organized rather differently. As I do not, I can only pass the unpleasant truth on to you.

Contest judges are structurally constrained to be quite a bit more generous — they actually are required to read all of each submission. However, as I mentioned yesterday, perceptions of marketability tend to weigh rather heavily in judging assessments. So when confronted with an entry that seems likely to be set aside for slowness by professionals… well, let’s just say it might be graded down.

As I mentioned in January, this is why it is a good idea, both for a contest entry and a first novel, to position a strong, memorable, active image as close to the beginning of your submission as possible. It’s astonishing how often the active scene on pg. 8 does not need 7 pages of explanation to occur first. Try constructing a first chapter — or short story beginning, or memoir opening — so it starts off with a bang, and hurls itself forward into the plot. Often, it’s the backstory that is best told on page 8, rather than the attention-grabbing action. It is one of the best ways I know to make a good writer’s first work seem to leap out of a pile of contest entries or agency submissions. Give it a try.

And, at the risk of sounding cynical about the industry (me? Perish the thought!), you do not ultimately have to use the action-packed opening in your finished book. Jump-starting the work is a trick of the trade, a sales tool, a means of getting a judge, agent, or editor to keep reading long enough to come to the realization that you can write.

Tomorrow, I shall delve into the issue of Voice, possibly the most subjective of the judging categories. Everyone defines good authorial voice differently (like the Supreme Court’s famous pronouncement about pornography, we may not be able to agree upon what it is, but we all know it when we see it), so does it all just come down to a matter of personal taste?

In a word, no. Tune in tomorrow to find out how and why.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Miss me? No, I did not take a long weekend; I had a mountain of time-consuming stress suddenly come up around my memoir. Not overwhelmingly productive, but necessary; it has had almost exactly the same effect upon the other aspects of my life as a particularly virulent bout of flu. Isn’t the writing life glamorous? I barely had the strength to deplore the apparently newly fashionable I’m-a-corpse-in-a-champagne-colored-dress look popular at the Oscars this year. Or to muse upon the irony that while the publishers are freaking out in this James Frey period over whether it’s still safe to publish memoirs, three of the four winners in the acting categories were playing real people — and no one seems to be suing THEM.

For those of you new to this blog, I was supposed to have a book coming out this month, but it has been pushed back to May at the earliest. My continuing apologies for not being able to fill you in more fully (still!) about the book’s continuing travails, but (a) legal issues still abound and (b) my feelings about what is going on cannot be described in the language used in children’s books, if you get my drift. If you’re curious about why a squabble about whether it is permissible to tell one’s own life story takes eight months (and counting) to resolve, well, so am I.

I’ll fill you all in about the whole saga the moment I may, of course: it’s a story that reveals a lot about the publishing industry. At each new turn of events, my agent keeps saying, “Wow, this would make a great screenplay!” All very dramatic, in other words, but not much fun. I did an interview about the book recently, where I was able to speak a bit more freely than I can in the PNWA’s forum, but otherwise, I can’t give any specifics about what is holding up production.

I’m back today, though, and eager to tackle a great question about contest entries from insightful and curious reader Marcille:

You mentioned the contest first-round judges evaluate the entries using a complex rating form. Can you explain more about what they are rating and what weighs heaviest in their evaluation?

Happy to oblige, Marcille; I’m sure a lot of people out there are curious. Every contest gives its first-round judges slightly different criteria for determining which entries should move on to the next stage (in most contests, the next stage is the finalist round); each category may have its own criteria and weighting rules. In a mystery category, for instance, maintaining suspense would count more heavily than in a mainstream novel category.

However, the general criteria tend to fall into five categories: Premise (also known as Core Idea or Theme, although each of these actually means something different. Go figure.), Presentation, Voice (also known as Viewpoint), Technique (sometimes collapsed into the same category as Voice), and Mechanics (and yes, this is different from Technique or Presentation). Usually, these categories are either weighed equally (as is the case for the PNWA contest), or Voice and Technique are given slightly more weight.

I’ll go through each category and discuss what judges tend to look for within it, but I want to pause first and call your attention to something significant: three of the five categories are heavily reliant upon not just craft, but nit-picky details. This emphasis means that even a “Wow! What a spectacular idea for a book!” entry with a strong, likeable narrative voice that’s full of technical problems CANNOT score particularly well.

Seem a trifle counterintuitive? Actually, the contest organizers are trying to help writers by weighting it this way — they are trying to reward manuscripts that are free of the type of mistake that tends to get submissions tossed by agents and editors. Emphasizing the cosmetic aspects in the first-round judges maximizes the probability that any entry that makes it to the finalist round will be absolutely ready for professional eyes.

And in the long run, this is good for both the writer and the contest — every writing contest organizer loves to boast about how this or that prize winner went on to publication success. Contest organizers wanting to be able to point to successful writers in later years and say, “See? Our contest discovered her/him.” Why, just look at how the PNWA bills me; I have relatives who boast about me less.

However, it could be argued that it would be BETTER for the entering writers if they were told this upfront. Remember how, in the weeks leading up to the contest deadline, I kept both yammering at you to proofread AND make sure your entry adhered to standard format? This was why.

The Premise category encompasses more than whether the entry is a cool idea for a book. Usually, the judge will be asked point-blank to assess the basic idea’s market appeal. (Do I hear the literary fiction writers out there moaning aloud?) Why? Well, see argument above about what the contest organizers like to have happen to their winners; a great little book with only tiny niche appeal will generally gain lower marks in this category than a less well-written entry with broader market potential.

This is important for writers to know, especially those marketing work with atypical attributes, such as a nonlinear plot or Socratic method argumentation. One of the questions judges are almost invariably asked to evaluate is, “Was the premise carried out consistently throughout the entry?” In order to answer this, all of the judges will have to
(a) understand your structural choices and underlying assumptions, and
(b) agree that they’re a good idea.
The more out there the entry, the chances that one or more of the judges will not embrace either (a) or (b).

There is an organizational reason for this: anyone who has been judging literary contests for awhile has seen a LOT of nontraditional entries, many of which are apparently the result of the authors’ not being aware of standard format or rules of argumentation. Sad but true, the more of these a judge has seen, the warier he is when he is confronted with the next one. To put it bluntly, your decision to omit punctuation because your narrator is illiterate may well be brilliant, but the last poorly-punctuated submission probably was not. Your entry is likely to suffer by association.

I have met many, many writers who have insisted that the nontraditional elements in their work were selling points. They cite example after example of major bestsellers with similar attributes, and have a hard time believing me when I point out that Mark Twain was hardly an unknown writer when he wrote HUCK FINN and Alice Walker was well enough established by the time she published THE COLOR PURPLE that no one seriously believed that she didn’t know how to use a semicolon properly. Yet at literally every writers’ conference I have ever attended (and believe me, I’ve been to plenty, all over the country), I have met at least one eager writer who informed me very earnestly that his or her book was far too out there for the mainstream. The publishing world, I am invariably informed, is probably not ready for a book this profound/innovative/insightful and/or political.

I have a couple of pieces of advice for people with genuinely startling projects. First, tip number one for pitching your work: DON’T give your hearer all the reasons that the book will have a hard time finding its audience! Second, a contest probably isn’t the best forum for getting your work discovered. In a contest, your entry has to make it past many sets of eyes, all of which will be attached to brains with their own strong opinions about what is and isn’t marketable. When you are querying, you generally need to convince only one person — most often, the agency’s designated query screener — to get past the first stage, but in a contest, it’s a group decision. Individuals are more likely to take a chance on something legitimately wacky than a contest committee.

If you take nothing else away from today’s discussion of premise, remember this: it is the writer’s responsibility to make the premise clear, not the reader’s to figure it out. Yes, the first chapter of a novel or nonfiction book is not a whole lot of time to establish a complex premise, but it is what the contest format offers you. Contests judges are not evaluating the overall merit of a book, even in categories that ostensibly do exactly that — they are judging how well the entry performs its self-assigned task of presenting its premise within the portion of the book that they SEE. This distinction sometimes renders writing a good contest entry and writing a good book different tasks.

There is more to the Premise category than this, of course, but that is material for tomorrow’s blog. I shall continue going over the contest judging categories in the days to come.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

P.S.: If you want a crash course in evaluating your own work as a contest judge, agent, or editor would, as one of a broad array of submissions, you could do no better than to volunteer to be a contest judge yourself. The PNWA is still looking for a few judges for this year’s contest — why not drop ’em an e-mail? Even if you entered the contest, you could still be a first-round judge in another category. It honestly is a learning experience like no other.

Hello, readers —

Today is the last in our series on self-publishing vs. traditional publishing, with our guests Jim McFarland, self-published author of DO OR DIE: THE BABY-BOOMER MAN’S GUIDE TO REGAINING HEALTH, HAPPINESS, VITALITY, AND A LONGER, FULLER LIFE, and Gary Graf, author of Ligouri’s AND GOD SAID, “PLAY BALL!”: AMUSING AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING PARALLELS BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND BASEBALL.

Before we begin, I would like to address an excellent observation that intelligent and insightful reader Pam sent in: yes, our guest Jim did decide to go with a print-on-demand company, which is one currently common way to self-publish. So how is this different from old-fashioned self-publishing?

For those of you unfamiliar with the terminology, self-publishing refers to any publishing project where the author pays the cost of producing and promoting the book. The author pays for (and often does herself) the marketing, and gets to keep all the money made. It’s a straightforward contractual arrangement, where the author takes on the financial risks personally. Even if a self-published book goes on to sell millions of copies (as with the case of Kevin Trudeau’s NATURAL CURES “THEY” DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT, the most successful self-published book in history), the publisher does not make more money, except insofar as it is paid by the author to produce more copies.

In the past, a self-published author’s only option was to pay the printer to produce a print run of predetermined size. The author then lugs the books around to bookstores and other venues where he hoped to sell them. This is a great option for people with strong sales skills, and a fabulous option for people who teach seminars — the book is right there for students to buy. (My brother, for instance, self-published a couple of books and promoted them on his lecture tours.) If the sales are good, and the author wants more books to sell, he would contract for another print run. Any unsold books, though, are left on his hands.

Technological advance has made another option possible, however: print-on-demand is a popular form of self-publishing. With print-on-demand, the author contracts with a publisher who specializes in such books, who agrees to print up new copies as they are ordered. This means that the author only has to pay for the copies he actually needs (although most POD authors do have many copies printed up at first to use in promotion and to sell in the usual self-publishing manner).

Jim, our guest who has kindly offered to share his experience, went the latter route. If there’s a reader out there who has gone the pre-order self-publishing route lately, I’d love to hear from you. (My feelings about nepotism prevent me from asking my brother to do it.) How was your experience different from Jim’s?

One last note, for those new to the concepts we’ve been bandying around this week: self-publishing is often confused by laypeople with subsidy publishing, also known as going through a vanity press. Subsidy publishing is when an author pays a press to produce his work, over and above the actual printing costs; superficially, subsidy press books resemble books produced by traditional publishers, but there is no competition involved in the author getting his work published.

Subsidy publishing is generally quite a bit more expensive for the writer than self-publishing, and certainly infinitely less well regarded. Why? Well, a subsidy press makes its profits exclusively from writers’ payments, so they will generally accept any manuscript submitted (which is not always true of self-publishing presses). They tend to assume that the writer has not done much comparative research, and charge a premium. That, and vanity presses often produce very nice volumes, tooled leather and such.

My hope is that this week’s posts will help clarify what is at stake in the decision about how to publish one’s work. Each of us has to take a good, hard look at her own abilities, desires, and work, and decide what method is best for us.

Okay, on to our guests. Gentlemen, any final thoughts on the differences between self-publishing and traditional publishing?

Jim: Self-publishing and traditional publishing are both very hard work. In my opinion, the biggest and most profound differences are:

The level of experienced support you receive from a traditional publishing house is substantial as compared to a self-publisher. Why? Because their primary interests are very different.

First, the self-publisher wants to get your book printed, while the traditional publisher wants to get your book printed, in bricks and mortar distribution and have the initial print level sold through at retail. Remember, the self-publisher makes money off printing your book. The traditional publisher makes money off selling your book through at retail.

Second, the self-publishing experience is much like the experience you have at a buffet, while the traditional publishing experience is more like having a waitperson help you through a five-course meal. The self-publisher lets you choose services and you pay as you go, while the traditional publisher works with you all the way through the process with a full complement of services.

Gary: Looking back, I realize that I did some things incorrectly, just as I did things well. My first and biggest mistake was to treat the submission process as lightly as I did. Given that anyone from agents to publishers on the manuscript side, and bookstores on the book side, receive thousands of properties vying for attention, an author has only one chance, and a brief one at that, to make a good first impression.

The difference between my first submission proposal and my second was akin to that of a little leaguer and a major leaguer.

Learning from this mistake, I was able to craft a much stronger submission proposal, lessons I also applied to any query letter to book reviewer, radio programmer or parish administrator. Though slow on the uptake, I finally took heed of one of my advertising profession’s basic creeds: know your audience. Thus, while sports radio stations showed no interest whatsoever in my interview proposals, syndicated Christian stations did.

Having gone through this experience once, I now realize that there are three parts to being an author. First, you must write your book. Next, you must sell your book. Finally, you must market your book.

Obvious, you say. True, but when writing the book, I was only concerned with that aspect, not what it would take to sell and, if sold, market the work. Each of these components requires discipline and an ability to learn from mistakes or failure, whether its comments from a developmental editor, a letter of refusal from an agent or publisher, or disinterest on a marketing proposal. Take a lesson from baseball. Only by going to bat time after time can you ever get a hit. Don’t forget, that in baseball, hitters who are considered the best in the game fail seven out of ten times at bat!

Anne: Thanks, Jim and Gary, for sharing your experiences with us. I hope both of your books continue to sell well!

I cannot stress this enough, readers, either in the context of this discussion or others about the traditional publishing industry: it is very, very helpful to know before you get embroiled in the process that the deeper you get into it, the less control you as the writer tend to have. It’s just the nature of the beast — as Jim pointed out, it’s in the publishing house’s interest to get your work to sell in the retail market. However, the author’s view of the best means of accomplishing that and the publisher’s often do not coincide, and in traditional publishing circles, it is rare that the author’s view triumphs in such a conflict.

The same holds true for working with an agent, to a lesser degree. The agent has a stake in selling her authors’ works to the publishing house she believes will do the best job promoting it. To that end, most agents will ask their clients to modify their work to meet what they perceive to be the up-to-the-minute needs of the market. The artistic or self-expressive reasons that the author wrote the book in the first place tend not to trump market interests in these discussed changes, alas.

The final choice between self-publishing and traditional publishing, it seems to me, is about who has control of the book before and after it is published. There are, of course, considerable financial and marketing differences, but fundamentally, a self-published author gets to make the important decisions about what will happen to the book, and a traditionally published author does not. There are compensations for giving up control, but make no mistake, when you sell a book to a publisher, giving up control is what you are doing. All of us need to figure out for ourselves how we feel about that, and choose accordingly.

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

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

I’ve been THRILLED with the extremely positive response to this week’s series on self-publishing vs. traditional publishing for nonfiction books. Turns out that a lot of us were curious.

Once again, I am pleased to be able to present the fascinating insights of Jim McFarland, self-published author of DO OR DIE: THE BABY-BOOMER MAN’S GUIDE TO REGAINING HEALTH, HAPPINESS, VITALITY, AND A LONGER, FULLER LIFE, and Gary Graf, author of Ligouri’s AND GOD SAID, “PLAY BALL!”: AMUSING AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING PARALLELS BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND BASEBALL. Today, our good friends will be discussing production and marketing.

Anne: Was the actual editing process much different?

Jim: Again, I paid for an editorial review and did not have my publisher edit the material. The self-publisher did offer publishing services for a reasonable fee. My editor actually charged me about the same price.

I had received cost estimates for both options prior to making a decision and just felt more comfortable having my editor nearby where we could discuss the material. I am now very glad that I did that.

Anne: That was really smart!

Gary: To be able to publish the book at a page count and price point that made economic sense, I was asked to cut about 10% of my content. Liguori left it to me as to which portions would be sent to the minors. Everything from contract talks to edits to galley proofs took place via telephone or email. Such is the nature of our cyber society that I did not meet my editor face to face until the book had already been printed!

Anne: That’s not uncommon at all anymore. I’ve never met my editor in person. The only reason I could pick him out of a police lineup is that I’ve seen a newspaper clipping of him playing bass in a band. But do go on, please.

Gary: While I was busy making edits, Liguori used its contacts to collect a set of wonderful vintage baseball photographs by Jack Zehrt, a St. Louis photographer. From Mr. Zehrt’s personal archive we were able to include rare photos of Joe DiMaggio. Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle and more. Not only did the shots add a great deal of richness to the book, they were something that on my own I would not have had access.

Anne: Tell us how the cover design process worked. For my memoir, I didn’t have any say over it at all. I felt very lucky that I ended up with a cover I liked.

Jim: For a fee, my publisher would have designed the cover. Fortunately, I work in a marketing communications company and our creative director designed a very striking cover. My cover depicts an overweight man with a robust stomach, wearing a pear of cut-off jeans, washing his 1965 white Bonneville car. My company designed the front of the cover, the spine and the back cover under guidelines provided by the self-publisher. I have received many compliments on the cover of my book.

Anne: Including from me! It’s incredibly evocative, such an appropriate choice for the book. I wish I could post it here, but here’s a link to it.

Jim: If you have competent design capability within your circle of friends or co-workers, then this is a viable option. If not, then work with the self-publisher.

Cover design is a very special art form. Frankly, I am not convinced that the self-publishing industry has highly competent cover design capability. However, finding alternatives can and is difficult. The easiest course of action is to pay your self-publisher for the service if you cannot find a suitable cover designer.

Gary: Per the contract, my publisher had the final say on the cover art and overall book size, page count, graphic treatment, photography, typography and content. Fortunately, not only were we on agreement on content and writing style, we both had the same idea for the cover art treatment.

Anne: That WAS fortunate! Again, I wish I could display the cover here, but I seem to lack the technological ability. Here’s the link.

Gary: Using the image of God touching the hand of Man from the Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel as inspiration, Liguori’s graphic artist developed a version where God is handing a baseball to mankind. Liguori was gracious enough to consult with me during all phases of production and thoughtfully considered my input. At the end of the day, however, while I wrote the book, they had the final word on all decisions regarding production and publishing.

Anne: Let’s turn to marketing. Big differences here, right?

Jim: With my self-publisher, you are able to purchase various kinds of marketing services. I purchased (a) an editorial review, and a (b) marketing workbook. I could have purchased various kinds of publicity services, but I elected not to, due to budget considerations.

Please also note that the majority of large daily newspapers do not review self-published books. As a result, you need to be very creative with your publicity approaches to get attention.

Anne: Yes, not everyone knows that; it’s actually policy. It’s a big consideration. But then, not all traditionally published books get reviewed in the large daily newspapers, either. So how did you get creative?

Jim: In October of 2005 I sent out 145 books to opinion leaders and health and fitness reporters throughout the U.S. I received publicity coverage in Washington, DC, Seattle, Michigan and other markets. I have been interviewed on one local Seattle TV station, as well as on two Seattle radio stations. One radio station and the TV interview were for _ hour each and one radio station was an hour.

In February of 2006, I created a “Fattest Male Baby Boomer Markets in U.S.” list and have been featured in the Cincinnati Inquirer and as I am writing this, I am forwarding out another 20 releases to media outlets around the country.

Anne: What a great idea! Publicists always tell writers to find a way to sell their books as tie-ins to news stories. What about you, Gary?

Gary: While Liguori had final say over production and marketing issues, they did allow me quite a bit of input based upon my advertising and publicity experience.

Anne: Really? Most traditionally published authors merely get to fill out author questionnaires. They were smart to recognize your expertise.

Gary: One key element of marketing was the securing of favorable quotes from sporting and spiritual sources. I had sent review copies to various book reviewers, sportswriters, and clergy in the area. Fortunately, a well-known Seattle baseball columnist, as well as the Archbishop of Seattle offered kind words about Play Ball. For their part, Liguori enlisted a senior editor at The Sporting News to write the foreword. These testimonials were used in any and all inquires to media, bookstores, and church groups.

Anne: A very good idea. Readers, that’s a good thing to bear in mind when you’re pulling together a NF book proposal: do you know any big names who would be willing to provide a blurb? Is there any way you could get the blurb in advance, so you can include a glowing blurb page in your book proposal?

But I digress. Do go on.

Gary: We jointly conceived of a launch event at the owner’s box at Safeco Field, home of the Seattle Mariners. Local press, media, bookstores, and friends were invited to an evening of books, brats, and beer.

Anne: I assume that brats refers to sausage, not to children.

Gary: Both Liguori and I were successful in setting up syndicated radio interviews with local and primarily Catholic/Christian radio stations. I taped a TV show for the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Together we sent review copies to mainstream and archdiocesan newspapers all across the country. My two alma maters, the University of San Francisco and the University of Washington, ran blurbs on the book. I also have participated in signing and speaking events at various Christian churches in my area.

I am happy to report that sales were such that the hardcover edition begat (to use a Biblical expression) a paperback version to be released in time for the 2006 baseball season.

Anne: I noticed that on Amazon. Congratulations!

Gary: From press reviews, I had collected a list of favorable quotes, the best of which will adorn the book’s back cover. To paraphrase Chicago Cub great Ernie Banks, “Great book for baseball, let’s publish two!”

Anne: Again, thank you so much for sharing your experiences, Jim and Gary. Aspiring writers tend not to hear very much about the post-contract aspects of the publication process, so I am delighted that you were willing to give us so many interesting insights.

Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up self-publishing week with a few final thoughts. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Today, we continue our series on the pros and cons of self-publishing with an interesting discussion between two published nonfiction authors:
Jim McFarland, self-published author of DO OR DIE: THE BABY-BOOMER MAN’S GUIDE TO REGAINING HEALTH, HAPPINESS, VITALITY, AND A LONGER, FULLER LIFE, and Gary Graf, author of AND GOD SAID, “PLAY BALL!”: AMUSING AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING PARALLELS BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND BASEBALL, published by Liguori/Triumph last year. (Both of these fine titles are available on Amazon at this very minute. Just think of THAT!)

Jim and Gary have been kind enough to share their respective publishing experiences with me, so readers of this blog can see for themselves the differences between pursuing the traditional publishing route and going it solo. As those of you who have been following Jim’s adventures over the last couple of days and this blog over the months know, either way a nonfiction author chooses to go has inherent benefits and risks. Here, we are lucky enough to be able to listen in on an intelligent, thoughtful discussion between two writers who have been there.

So, apart from throwing out the first ball and the occasional follow-up pitch, I’m going to back off and let them speak for themselves. Enjoy!

Anne: How was the writing process different for each of you?

Jim: I had total control over my material. The publisher with whom I worked offered an editorial evaluation for a price. I paid for this evaluation and received a very candid and honest assessment from the self-publisher. I am glad that I purchased this service.

Gary: By way of contrast to Jim’s experiences about self-publishing let me offer my thoughts on following the traditional publishing path. Like Jim, I too am a first-time author. In fact, when he was working on his book, DO OR DIE, I was writing mine, AND GOD SAID, “PLAY BALL!” — AMUSING AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING PARALLELS BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND BASEBALL.

As you might guess from the title, my book blends aspects of the Good Book with those of the great game. In it, I explore themes of forgiveness, reconciliation, prayer, redemption, service and more through connections the sport and scripture share. For instance, I examine the Book of Ruth with the career of Ruth (Babe), Joseph of Egypt and Joe DiMaggio, Moses and (Hank) Aaron. Admittedly, some sections are definitely tongue in cheek, yet most take serious spiritual themes and make them much more accessible by associating them with the game of baseball.

Oftentimes in the non-fiction arena, books are purchased based on outlines and sample chapters, depending upon the perceived interest and marketability of the subject matter and/or author. In my case, I had a completed manuscript to submit. As such, I had complete control over the initial draft. Working off and on at nights and on weekends, the book took between 12 and 18 months to write. Upon completion of the manuscript, I engaged in a developmental edit to prepare my rough draft for submission. This added another six months to the process, resulting in a 10% reduction of content.

Anne: How was the contract process different?

Jim: My contract provides me with (1) total ownership and copyright of the material, (2) My granting of licensing rights to the publisher to have the book printed and be made available in e-Book formats, (3) payment of royalties in several different and optional plans, (4) requirements for proofing material, and other minor provisions.

I had my contract approved by an intellectual property lawyer and he said the contract was very common and acceptable in the publishing industry and afforded me the proper protections.

Gary: Never having published a book before, everything about the process was new to me. Most daunting was the contract. I assume most publishers have a boilerplate agreement that they issue to their authors. Seeing so many clauses and contingencies was enough to boggle the mind. Issues presented were ownership, timing of ownership, royalty rates, rights and permissions, the publisher’s rights of production and more.

I had to weigh my desire to be published against what I was willing to give up in terms of rights and royalties. I must say that Liguori was quite amenable to most of my suggestions and we arrived at a contract with which we both could live. To be honest, as a first time author with only one publisher interested in my work at that point, I had little if any leverage in negotiations!

In my particular instance — a non-fiction book that occasionally excerpts from or refers to other sources — I was responsible for obtaining author/publisher permissions to reprint. This was an arduous task entailing a number of phones calls, faxes, emails, and the like to track down the proper people to contact, negotiate reprint fees, and sign agreements. A number of my references, being 300 words or less, fell under a free use category. Even so, I needed to obtain the appropriate permissions. I have to say, that while time consuming, the effort proved worthwhile. The only unfortunate aspect of it, obviously, was the out of pocket expenses. Fees ranged anywhere from $20 to $250. Depending upon how many sources you need permissions for, these fees can add up.

Anne: Tell us about how you submitted your work.

Jim: The publisher spelled out the submission process to me in advance. My responsibilities and their work were clearly defined in terms of task and timeline. I found this to be very helpful and desirable for making it through this process in a timely manner.

Essentially, they would send me a PDF copy of the book for review along with a word template review form. I would review the PDF copy page by page and then submit review changes. They would then update the manuscript and send another copy for review within several days. I went through several PDF copy reviews from mid-June to early August 2005. Then I submitted final approval and moved on to having the book published.

Gary: Initially, I put together a letter of inquiry, an outline of my book, and a sample chapter and sent it off to a handful of agents and a couple of publishers. Like many naïve authors, I waited for the bidding war to begin. No such luck. To an agent, all passed on representing me. The two publishing companies also declined to pursue my work.

At this point, I decided I had better do a better job of marketing my book. Given that both Jim and I are partners in a Seattle advertising agency, you would have thought that I would have taken a much more careful and professional approach the first time around. No doubt, I fell under the false notion that my book would sell itself. Not so.

Anne: A lot of first-time authors are under that impression, alas.

Gary: I suspect that the agents I queried decided that my book would appeal to too narrow an audience to be worth their time, if it appealed at all. So my new first task was to determine who the best market would be for my work. Given that PLAY BALL explored two subjects, baseball and the Bible, I figured it would appeal to those fans and faithful alike. However, in marketing, you really need to prioritize your target audience. Chances were that PLAY BALL would appeal more to people interested in the Bible who also enjoyed baseball, than to fans of the game and wanted to learn more about the Bible.

With this in mind, I sought to find publishers who specialized in works of a spiritual nature. To do this, I researched Catholic/Religious publishers via Jeff Herman’s GUIDE TO BOOK, PUBLISHERS, EDITORS, & LITERARY AGENTS. From the many such publishers he profiled, I selected my Top Ten.

Next, I prepared a proposal that not only well represented my manuscript but also showed why there was a market for it. I referenced how well Mel Gibson’s PASSION OF THE CHRIST did at the box office as well as how many millions of fans attended baseball games each year. I included an outline of my book, three sample chapters, marketing approaches, publicity ideas, and personal information. Then I waited.

Over the next few months, I received a variety of responses. There were those who stated that the book did not fit their publishing criteria. One editor at a well-known publisher commented that they took both content and marketability into consideration when weighing a proposal. And while he found the premise creative, he noted that I was neither a theologian nor a baseball player (items I noted myself in my book) and thus lacked a platform from which to launch the book. Another publisher decided that the book was not something they would pursue but thought enough of my proposal to offer the names of two other publishers that they thought might be interested.

In the midst of all these replies came a phone call from Liguori Publications. Located outside of St. Louis, they expressed initial interest and asked that I send a complete manuscript. Some weeks later, an editor called and left me a message that he had some good news. They wanted to publish the book!

Little did I know how rare a decision this was. My book had come “over the transom.” In other words, it was unsolicited. Liguori publishes only 30 books a year and reviews 12 times that number of submissions. What’s more, they review proposals on twin tracks: the economics of production and the potential of sales. Fortunately, both review committees wanted to PLAY BALL.

Anne: I’m going to stop us here for today, because this is a LOT of information for those new to the process. I suspect that readers who had not yet learned from personal experience just how much work is involved in getting a book to press — through either the self-publishing or traditional publishing routes — might be a trifle stunned.

Thanks, Jim and Gary! Tomorrow, we shall move on to the nitty-gritty, the practical details of the two types of publishing.

Before I sign off for today, here are a couple of things I would like to underscore here. First, obviously, neither route is for the lazy, as I think their respective stories abundantly illustrate.

Second, as Gary points out, it is extremely rare for an unsolicited manuscript to be picked up by a publisher. Gary did it the right way, submitting a proposal first, but still, most NF books come to traditional publishers via agents or by solicitation. Before you go to the time and trouble of submission — which, as you may see, is considerable — do check that the publisher will consider unsolicited manuscripts.

And if your book is fiction, don’t try this trick at home. Never send an unsolicited manuscript for a novel; always, always, ALWAYS query first.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

P.S. to Marcille: Excellent question! I shall tackle it next week.

Hello, readers —

For those of you who didn’t tune in yesterday, we’re in the middle of an exciting series on the ins and outs of self-publishing, courtesy of one who has been there: PNWA member Jim McFarland, self-published author of DO OR DIE: THE BABY-BOOMER MAN’S GUIDE TO REGAINING HEALTH, HAPPINESS, VITALITY, AND A LONGER, FULLER LIFE and and all-around good guy.

Jim has been kind enough to answer a few questions about self-publishing, for the benefit of all of you out there who have considered going the brave route. Our focus today: how does one get started? Jim has come up with some great guidelines to help you through this potentially frightening process.

Anne: How did you go about choosing a publisher?

Jim: Choosing a self-publisher is somewhat akin to selecting a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant. Why? Because unlike casual other business relationships, working with a publisher, even a self-publisher, is a very personal experience since the work to be done is of extraordinary value to you and is a statement of who you are and what you believe.

So how do you start your search? There are several methods and I recommend you pursue these avenues and more. First, talk with friends or acquaintances that have had work published. Second, look for self-publishers on the Internet and start researching their services and prices. Third, review books and literature that are available to the public.

You might wish to start by checking out a book entitled The Self-Publishing Manual: How to Write, Print, and Sell Your Own Book, 14th Edition (Paperback), by Dan Poynter. I did not read this book when I began my review into self-publishing. And I do not believe his book would have changed my approach or my final decision. That is not to say that it is not a good book. It has received great reviews and you may want to check it out.

(Parenthetically, I should add that I had purchased a book that was designed to help authors prepare proposals for publishers. I did buy this book and found the investment to be useless. The best advice I could have received at the very beginning of my search would have been to bypass publishing houses altogether and move directly to self-publishing.)

An online search for self-publishers is a simple and inexpensive exercise. Certainly, you will have to supplement this search with more work and analysis, but it is a good way to get started.

Another starting point will be to make connections with writers through writers’ associations and groups. You may be able to make contact with people who can give you ideas and suggestions.

Anne: Good ideas, all. But how do you narrow it down to the final choice, and how do you know which companies are legit?

Jim: When you begin your analysis of self-publishers, I recommend that you utilize varying amounts of common sense, caution, research, and intuition to help guide your final decision. Here is how these three areas play out:

1. Be cautious about claims made by any self-publisher. Seek explanations and confirmation for the validity of all claims.

If you visit self-publisher websites on the Internet, you are going to be bombarded with price offers and special promotions. When I began my Internet search, I read and copied each page of every publisher website I visited. In addition, I book marked each site address so I could revisit. This gave me a good base of data and information to review. Since there is no handbook on how to select a self-publisher, I reviewed all this material and began to make intuitive judgments about what seemed believable and what did not.

I compared prices, I looked at draft contracts, I looked at publisher timelines, services offered during and after publishing, customer service and any other information that some self-publishers make available for review. I read their FAQ sections of websites and I always looked for independent third party endorsements of the publisher and any of their claims.

I emailed several of the publishers, asking them for clarification of services offered and prices. That was easy to do and I judged them by their responses. Some responded promptly and some did not. Those that did respond scored points with me and those that did not respond at all or not promptly were crossed off my list.

2. Try to make contact with authors.

I checked self-publisher websites to get the names of authors and their titles. I also searched daily newspapers for author names and their book titles. Using the titles of their books, I did searches to try to find email addresses. This worked several times. I was fortunate to be able to talk with several authors about their self-publishing experience. Through this approach, I have established a friendly business relationship with another self-help author in the Midwest. We discuss issues via email periodically.

3. Use your business instincts as a guide to help in your selection.

My gut instincts told me that there were self-publishers who were primarily interested in making money while there were others who wanted to make money and help authors be successful. Here is a classic example.

I interviewed with one local self-publishing firm in the Northwest that wanted to charge me over $20,000 for publishing 3,000 books and doing the copy editing work. I inquired about the possibility of buying the services individually since I did not have that kind of money. They told me that they did not do business that way. I found that to be outrageous because the likelihood of needing 3,000 books right up front was not very realistic.

Then, after looking at their client list, the business plan for this publisher became clear to me. Many of the authors on their client list were older business executives and educational leaders. Many of these folks were merely using books as elegant and expensive calling cards.

By comparison, the array of services from the publisher I selected would have cost in the range of $35,000 to $40,000, if I had chosen all the same services up front as one complete package. The Northwest firm said I had to buy a $20,000 package or there was no deal. However, I did not want to do that. I wanted a self-publisher that had a menu from which I could select at the time that was best for me. I was able to find the firm with the menu I wanted. As a result, my initial investment is much, much lower than $20,000.

The bottom line was that I had to find what I really felt was the right place for me to be with my book. I followed my instincts and I have been very satisfied. The idea that the final selection decision can be logical and based solely on financial and business data would not have worked for me. At some point, you have to look at all your research and say, “I think I will be more comfortable with this firm.” That is what I did.

As I look back on this process now, I believe there are several key decision points that must have resolved to your satisfaction. They are as follows:

1. The firm must have the experience to do a competent job with your work.

2. The self-publisher should have a record of accomplishment of satisfied authors.

3. The firm should have some way of validating their work quality through referrals or endorsements.

4. The firm’s prices must fit your budget.

5. Make sure the firm offers the array of services you might wish to access.

6. The firm should be able to explain how they service their customers.

Ultimately, you have to review all the information you have received and make a final judgment.

I hope some of my ideas will help you with your decision making process.

Anne: Thanks, Jim. This really helps demystify the process. Tomorrow, we’ll get into a comparison between going the traditional publishing route and self-publishing. I think readers may be surprised by some of the answers.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

I have a real treat for you over the next few days: Jim McFarland, successfully self-published author of DO OR DIE: THE BABY-BOOMER MAN’S GUIDE TO REGAINING HEALTH, HAPPINESS, VITALITY, AND A LONGER, FULLER LIFE, has very graciously agreed to answer a few pointed questions about the process of self-publishing.

Most of us have thought about it, haven’t we? It’s appealing, having control over the publication process. Yet how does one go about it? Even for those of us who’ve spent a lot of time hanging out at writers’ conferences and reading writers’ publications, our information on the subject tends to be sketchy, at best second-hand and anecdotal.

So I asked Jim to give me the lowdown on the practicalities. Over the next few days, I shall be posting the results. Enjoy!

Anne: How did you come to the decision to self-publish?

Jim: At the age of 52, I received a bone chilling call from my doctor following a physical in the spring of 2002. He told me that in addition to my problems with hypertension and obesity, I was now close to having type two diabetes, a chronic condition attacking millions of older Americans.

After the call, I went out searching for resources to help me figure out what to do. Unfortunately, my search left me empty handed. I found nothing because there was no comprehensive “health renewal guide” for older men. Such a resource did not exist. Within weeks, my searches turned into notes and then notes turned into short “how to articles.” After another six to eight weeks of introspection and contemplation, I decided that it was my job to write a guide to help older men with their health.

Entitled Do or Die, my book will help baby boomer men restore health, vitality, happiness, and longevity through fitness, faith, and food. Do or Die helps men figure out how to get out of denial and discover the inspiration and willpower to create a life-changing renewal and a healthy lifestyle.

What motivated me to write is a simple and sad fact. Middle-aged men between the ages of 45 and 64 are dying from cardiovascular disease and stroke at double the rate of women in the same age group. According to the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics in 2002, 79,873 men died from cardiovascular disease or stroke. That works out to 219 baby-boomer men per day. I still find that figure almost too incredible to believe. However, it is true.

Frankly, I simply reached a point in my life where I said, “I am sick and tired of watching and hearing about thousands of men giving up and dying. Men need help and I want to wake them up and tell them their lives are worth living. My book Do or Die will help men begin to make those changes.”

Fast forward to the spring of 2004, nearly 23 months following my physical. I had spent months writing and submitting proposals to agents and publishers. They were turning me down about as rapidly as I could distribute them. I was starting to believe that my idea for the book was just not going to gain any traction. Early one afternoon I opened and read my 34th proposal rejection letter from an agent. I was frustrated, exhausted, cranky, and ready to quit writing.
I decided the medicine that might help me the best was a two to three week hiatus away from anything and everything related to writing.

During this forced vacation, I began thinking about why I had started to work on this project in the first place. What I discovered in the middle of all of this was that I had become a slave to the process that every writer, literary agent and publisher talks about. You know what I am talking about. Of course you do. You may have become a slave to the process and lost sight of why you started this journey in the first place.

This is the grinding and toiling associated with writing proposals and trying to get somebody, somewhere to pay attention to your idea. You work extra hours on weekends, nights, noon hours, before work, and after Church. Whenever you can squeeze another edit out of a proposal, or make another trip to Kinko’s to copy something that has to be mailed the following day. You know the feelings. Your hopes are up; the process enthralls you, because you are making progress. At least you think you are moving forward.

Somehow, somewhere in the middle of writing I forgot about the fact that approximately 200,000 books are published every year. I forgot about the heated competition that exists for ideas that will make the cash registers ring in bookstores. I began to think, as we all do, that my book would own the real estate in an agent’s mind.

My proximity to success was palpable every day I sat at the typewriter. I could see myself on Oprah sharing my story with the masses. I could envision customers lining up in bookstores waiting to have me sign their precious copies. I could see myself on television, giving interviews to local news stations.

Yes, I had already painted the canvas with my success, oblivious to what was really happening with my writing project. I was drunk with bravado, hope, and unabashed egotism. Truthfully and sadly, I had really lost sight of my original mission, which was to write a book that will help older men get healthy again.

What helped me escape the vice-like grip of this confusing mess? It was the re-examination of thinking through why I started in the first place. I asked myself two simple, but powerful questions. Why am I writing this book? What do I want out of it? I really did think about quitting. That was a simple and very clean option. It would have been so easy and simple to delete everything about my project from my two computers at work and home. That process probably would have been completed in about an hour. I could have ordered the computer consultant to dump the backup files and the process would have been complete. It would be over. The chapter would have been closed.

As I examined the idea of dumping all these files, I found myself thinking that such an event would be tantamount to burning down a house that was 70 percent complete. Could I really do it? Just dump everything?

Whenever I get into these situations, I find that you have to let your heart lead you through this thicket of confusion. Using your mind, with all of its intended and rational processes, can often result in bad answers and results. Therefore, I led with my heart.

My heart responded to the question about why I was writing with this answer: “to help people.” On the second question of what I wanted out of it, my heart said “you are writing this to help yourself get healthy and to help others learn from your work.”

Following this trump by the heart over the mind, I resolved to go forward to finish the book. The reflection period was over. I would send out a few more proposals to mainline publishers and if those were rejected, then I would move to the world of self-publishing. And that is what I did.

Anne here again: thanks, Jim. Tomorrow, we’ll move on to Jim’s observations on how to navigate the often-confusing morass of self-publishing options.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Yes, I know, I promised you an entry today on how to write an author bio, and I assure you that I will give you one soon. Today, however, I feel a very strong compulsion to discuss a severe disadvantage under which writers, particularly first-time ones, suffer: contract fluidity.

There are a lot of truisms in the publishing industry, so I don’t feel that I will be telling tales out of school if I mention that on average, publishing contracts hugely favor the publishing company. The publisher gets to set how much the author is paid per copy, when the deadlines are, when and how the book is published, how it will (or won’t) be promoted, and, to a very great extent, the content. It’s like that old joke:

Q: Where does a 300-pound gorilla sit?

A: Anywhere he wants.

From the author’s point of view, until she is well-established, any publisher is a 300-pound gorilla looking for festival seating at her concert. Few of the salient contract points are truly negotiable, unless the author is already well established or a celebrity in her own right. You could not, for instance, decide unilaterally that since the contract specifies that the author will receive a 12.5% share of the cover price for hardback and a 7% share for trade paper, that your book was going to come out in hardback. The publisher makes all of these decisions, with few exceptions; the contract just codifies them. And we writers, by and large, accept that.

What comes as a shock to most writers — myself included, I’ll admit — is that while the parts of the contract that specify what the author must perform tend to be adhered to with praiseworthy rigidity by all parties, the parts that specify what the publisher will do in return and when tend to be treated as mere guidelines.

An author could not, for instance, refuse to deliver a manuscript by the date specified in the contract, or neglect to perform requested revisions, or back out of touring to promote the book, without being in breach of contract and sued accordingly. A publisher can, by contrast, change or ignore contracted deadlines, not honor agreements set forth in the contract about presentation specifics, and/or not pay the advance and royalties in a timely manner.

Yes, you read that correctly; one of the best reasons to work through an agent is to have an enforcer for the money part of the contract. A standard publishing contract specifies that 1/3 of the advance will be paid on signing, 1/3 upon delivery of the manuscript, and 1/3 when the book is released. However, it is far from uncommon for the advance check not to show up for months after the contract is signed, or for six months or a year to pass between royalty checks.

Let me ground this in practical terms. In my own case, my publisher bought my book just under eleven months ago. Nine months ago, I delivered the manuscript — two weeks ahead of schedule, as a matter of fact. The first installment of the advance arrived three weeks after that, roughly two and a half months after signing. And not a kopeck since.

Shocked? Don’t be. This is a relatively normal state of affairs.

While that’s sinking in, let me hasten to inform you that the contract also specified that the publisher would furnish me with editorial feedback on the book by August 15, two months after receiving the manuscript. I would then have two months, until October 15, to formulate a new draft, after which my publisher could accept or submit new revision requests by December 15.

Tell me, what is today’s date?

The dates I had set my watch by simply haven’t applied. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it, except to declare the contract broken and cancel publication.

There’s the rub, you see: how many writers would actually cancel a book contract? Would you stop publication on a book you have been slaving over for years, just because of a technicality? Or even something major?

Exactly. Think the inmates of publishing houses aren’t aware of that? Good answer; you’re starting to get a feel for the logic of the industry.

Nor is timing the only common bone of contention. Contractually, as I mentioned back in the fall, I had consultation rights over the cover design and title approval.

You can see this coming, can’t you?

I was simply presented with a new title by the marketing department — which, in case you don’t know, is the norm for first books — and although I kicked and screamed about it, it stuck. I did not even know that a final decision had been made until my book appeared for presale on Amazon under that title, with a book cover that I’d never seen before. And, of course, the release date — which I also have historically learned first from Amazon — has changed so many times that even my relatives have stopped boasting about when my book will hit the shelves.

And this, incidentally, is for a book that everyone at the publishing house purportedly LIKES. They keep telling me what a good writer I am, how compelling the story I’m telling is, and how little revision it needed. I have every indication that they even like me personally, in fact. But that hasn’t necessarily made them stick to the contract, or stopped them from adding conditions to it after the fact.

And how trained are writers to tiptoe around the 300-pound gorilla? You will note, please, that I am still referring to these people as my publishers. Which means that I have not put my wee foot down and said ENOUGH.

Why? Because none of this is particularly unusual, although having all of it happen on one book is. As I said, contractual fluidity is proverbial, at least insofar as it applies to the publishing house’s end of the deal. Because authors do get sued when they don’t live up to their end of the contract; publishing houses, by and large, do not.

You probably already know why. It’s all about reputation. A writer who insists upon the letter of the contract is “difficult,” a surprisingly hard moniker to shake. Difficult behavior runs the gamut from not turning in manuscripts when promised (which particularly annoys agents) to fighting with editors over piddling changes to not answering e-mails. A difficult writer flies into a fury when telephoned a request. Things like that.

Basically, if you’ve ever heard of Norman Mailer doing it, it’s probably what the industry would consider difficult behavior in a writer. If you want to talk proverbial.

They are not nearly so easy to offend as writers’ conference-circuit gossip would have us believe, though; after all, most of the people making the judgment are New Yorkers, who are used to people getting in their faces. Contrary to popular opinion, no one is going to hold a grudge against a writer who picks up the phone and calls an agent who’s had her requested manuscript for two months, for instance. A difficult writer would have called in a week, and every day thereafter, using language generally debarred from PG films.

(In case you’re curious, the reason you have always been told at conferences NEVER to call is that the agents who say it are speaking to a crowd. They want EVERYBODY not to call; in other words, their lives are hell when every writer who sends a submission follows up with a phone call, as if they were selling aluminum siding. They don’t like the hard sell, so it seldom works. But individual writers who have a legitimate concern that the three-week exclusive the agent asked for on the manuscript elapsed two weeks ago certainly should call.)

What will get you dismissed immediately is being unprofessional, not difficult. You generally have to push someone’s buttons mightily to be labeled difficult, like screaming into a telephone, whereas being labeled unprofessional can be as simple as handing someone a manuscript printed in the wrong typeface.

Having a reputation for being difficult can make editors reluctant to pick up your work, certainly. Since writers know that, we tend to be afraid to rock the boat at all. Still, even with all of us holding stock-still in rowboats all over the nation, every so often, a soft-spoken writer will find that she has inadvertently offended someone, simply by innocently asserting that since the contract exists, perhaps it ought to be honored.

Welcome to my day.

Today, I had a vivid flashback to a college production of Peter Pan. I played Nana, the nursemaid dog, in a costume that makes me blush to think of now; because it was one of those highly experimental productions that youthful exuberance makes seem plausible, I also played a pirate on Cap’n Hook’s ship (I was known for my hornpipe), the Never-Never Bird (defies explanation), and a mythical sea sprite who capered in the waves.

You kind of had to be there.

As Nana, as you may perhaps imagine, I spent a whole lot of rehearsal time scuffling about on my unpadded hands, knees, and elbows. Painful, even for a 19-year-old, especially when we moved into our performance space, which for reasons best known to the architect had concrete floors. Naturally, I asked for gloves and knee pads, but somehow, they never materialized. Oh, by dress rehearsal I had some mittens tarted up as paws, but they had no padding.

(Actual quote from the knee specialist who regularly treats Seahawks, gazing intently at MRI pictures of my knees a decade and a half later: “No kidding? I’m amazed you were able to walk after that.”)

The director told me that my requests were unreasonable, that padding was expensive and bulk would spoil the line of my costume. I stood it as long as I could, but eventually, the pain would become too great, and I’d ask again. And thus, my friends, did I attain the reputation of being a “difficult” actress: because I pointed out that permanent damage was being done to my knees.

Not that this has anything to do with my book or anything.

I wish I had some words of wisdom about how to handle contractual fluidity, but today, I honestly don’t. All I can do in this instance is to let you know about it as a phenomenon, so you don’t feel singled out if it happens to you. Which I hope and pray that it doesn’t.

As nearly as I can tell — and this is the voice of experience gleaned over a decade of marketing my own writing and observing the progress of my friends and clients — most people in the publishing industry simply don’t understand that heaping stress upon writers is counterproductive. As any artist could tell them, stress interferes with the creative process. We’re not copy-generating machines; we’re living, breathing people who would like to be treated with respect, not sat upon by gorillas.

This is definitely a business where it behooves you to bring your own knee and elbow pads from home.

My, I’m gloomy today, amn’t I? I’ll try to snap back into cheerful mode again by next week. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Many, many thanks to the kind souls who have been writing in to let me know how my recent contest postings have (or have not) been helpful in getting contest entries out the door. Part of the difficulties of writing for a nebulous audience with a broad range of experience is that it’s hard to tell if I’m telling readers what they already know, so the feedback’s been very helpful.

For those of you who missed yesterday’s post, a novel of mine is just passing into the submission phase of its existence, the nail-biting period where editors shake their heads over it and, I hope, guffaw from time to time. I thought you might like to hear about what happens to a novel after an agent takes it off the author’s hands. So greetings from the Novel Project, Day 3.

Have you ever wondered what that notation in the agents’ guidebooks, “charges for photocopying” means, and why some agencies seem to do it and some don’t? Are some just nicer to authors than others? And what precisely are they photocopying? The book contract, or the Manhattan phone book?

Actually, the distinction is not between an agency’s charging for photocopying and not; it’s between whether the agency DOES photocopying or not. This may not seem like a major issue, but think about it: these people are dealing with many, many manuscripts. Where does each submission copy come from?

An agency that charges for photocopying will handle producing all of those necessary copies itself. Rather than asking for that money up front (copying deposits from writers used to be not uncommon), the agency will wait until the book is sold, then subtract the copying costs from the first part of the advance. (Depending on the agency, similar arrangements may exist for postage and/or messenger costs.) Basically, this kind of agency is demonstrating its faith in its clients’ books by fronting office expenses.

From the writer’s POV, there are definite plusses to this arrangement. It’s a lot less work, for one thing, than when the author handles making the copies herself. In most cases, if the book does not ultimately sell, the author never gets a photocopying bill. And often, the per-page price is quite reasonable, perhaps a bit more than your local Kinko’s, but then, you save the cost of shipping all of those copies across the country.

Do check before you sign, though, because sometimes it’s quite a bit more. (This is a perfectly legitimate question to ask an agent who is interested in representing you.) I have known authors who have opted out of the arrangement, choosing to make the copies for themselves, because it was cheaper.

There’s another reason that you might want to consider opting out. If you are a writer who is prey to last-minute qualms, rewriting and rewriting, it is not beyond belief that at some point, you will want to make a change after your agency has gone ahead and photocopied a previous draft — which would leave you with a double charge. And if we’re talking about 15 copies of a 300-page book… well, you do the math.

The other kind of agency does not photocopy, except in cases where instant production of a copy is deemed essential. Your agent was pitching something else, realized she was having lunch with the perfect editor for your book, but you were deep-sea diving off Costa Rica and could not be reached… that sort of thing. When this type of agency wants to submit your work, your agent calls you up and says, “Gee, can you send me 20 copies of your book proposal?” You make the copies yourself, then ship the whole shebang to the agency.

Yes, it’s more work, and yes, you do end up paying the shipping costs, which can be considerable. Paper is heavy. However, you have control over the type of paper used, the print quality, and even the number of submissions. When your agent has to ask, you can negotiate. You have absolute control of how much you are out-of-pocket — and even though all of these expenses are tax-deductible (even if you have a day job, writing can technically be your small business), you may very much want to make sure you don’t go too far into debt for them.

I’ve been with both types of agency, and I have to say, I prefer the latter. But then, I don’t feel that the paper generally used for photocopying is high enough quality to present my work well. Unless I’ve been asked to provide a zillion copies, I prefer to print them myself.

My writer friends have a name for this: obsessive. And perhaps it is. But something happened when I photocopied my master’s thesis that shook me to the core: unbeknownst to me, a copying machine ate pg. 42. So I turned in a thesis that was missing a page, one that I like to think was rather important to my argument. Woe and uproar ensued.

At the risk of making everyone paranoid, tell me, when you photocopy a long document, do you generally go through it to make sure that all of the pages are there? That none of them are smudged? Or that there aren’t extra blank pages tucked inside?

So that is why today, after yesterday’s little chat with my agent, I spent today printing up eight copies of my 395-page novel on bright white 24-lb. paper and stuffing them in a great big box. (In case you’re curious, it required an 18″ x 12″ x 10” cardboard crate.) Yes, it would have been substantially quicker just to run up the hill to my adorable little neighborhood copy store, but do you have any idea how much they charge for higher-grade paper? Or how they look at you when you want to go through each copy, page by page?

Okay, so maybe it IS a tad obsessive. But these copies are gorgeous. They feel good in the hand. The paper is blinding white; every letter on every page is dark and sharply-defined. I was able to catch that typo on pg. 361. And I assure you, pg. 42 is in each and every copy.

Besides, all of that printing time gave me leisure to punch up my author bio, which needed to accompany each copy. Of that, more tomorrow.

In the middle of the process, watching myself check margins for stray ink smudges, I had to laugh: after all of my months of urging you all to pay attention to the cosmetic details, this is probably how many of you picture me spending every day. No, just when a submission has to get out the door, but then, I truly do practice what I preach.

Ah, the glamour of a writer’s life…

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

I’m going to operate under the assumption that a lot of my regular readers are spending this prototypically gray PNW day frantically proofreading their entries, searching wildly for an envelope large enough to fit two copies, and generally freaking out because it’s deadline day for the PNWA literary contest. (For those of you Seattle-area members who are truly panicking, there’s a post office down near SeaTac who postmarks later than the average — until 8 p.m., if memory serves, but do call ahead of time and make sure. It’s in Burien.)

Remember the feeling of this day: after you win (as I sincerely hope you will), people will ask you about how confident you felt as you passed your entry into the tender care of an overworked postal employee. Just so you know, “I wondered why I put myself through this hell” does not play well as a response. Make up something you’d like your biographers to reprint a hundred years from now.

So now the long wait to hear back begins. Category finalists are generally notified in late May or early June, early enough that they can get good airfares to attend the conference. If your entry does not make the finals, you will not hear back until after the conference, when you receive your feedback sheets.

If you are a finalist, PLEASE, for your own sake, try to make it to the conference. There are scholarships available (check the PNWA homepage for details.) A finalist ribbon dangling over one’s stomach is like a backstage pass at a sold-out rock concert: if you’re brave about it, it really does allow you much more leeway about buttonholing agents and editors in the hallways. Not to mention making it substantially easier to meet other contest attendees; it’s an instant conversation-starter, a variation on the contest-ubiquitous, “So, what do you write?”

In case you’re curious about what will happen to your entry between now and then, first, it will be processed by wonderful, charming volunteers who don’t get nearly enough credit for the hours they put in on all of our behalves. They do the bureaucratic part, separating the entry form from the entries, arranging them by category for blind judging, assigning numbers so they can later figure out whose anonymous entry was whose. Then they go to the category chair, who in turn will assign them to the first-round judges. Two first-round judges will read each entry, filling out complex rating forms. After the entries are ranked, the category chair will tabulate the findings, make ultra-sure that all of the top-ranked entries met ALL of the entry requirements, and come up with a list of finalists. The bureaucratic end will then figure out who those entrants were, and then the finalists’ entries will go on to the category judge, usually either someone prominent in that particular field or one of the agents or editors attending the conference.

With the exception of the final judge, every single person who touches your entry is a volunteer. You should stand and cheer for these people; they are doing us all a great big favor.

If you did not enter this year’s contest, you might want to consider contacting the PNWA and offering to be a first-round judge in your favorite category. I can think of no experience that will educate you faster (short of being a query screener in a top-ranked agency) about what does and does not look professional in a manuscript. You will also get an unparalleled view of the kind of competition you can expect if you enter future contests. It’s also quite interesting, and the joy a judge feels upon discovering a hit-it-out-of-the-ballpark entry really isn’t like anything else. (Except, perhaps, watching your favorite ball player hit a home run. But that lasts for a mere second, while the elation of reading a truly superlative entry lasts for hours. Or maybe I’m just more enamored of good writing than most people.)

As it happens, I am beginning a waiting phase today, too: yesterday, my agent and I decided that the time was ripe to start marketing my novel. Yes, I write fiction, too: very mainstream fiction with a comic twist. Since I’ve been able to fill you in from time to time on the bizarre side journeys a memoir makes on its way to publication (although admittedly mine has had a stranger trip than most), I thought it might be interesting if I tracked the novel’s progress here, too. That way, you could get a sense in real time what it feels like to have a really good agent out there shopping around your work.

Since the decision was made yesterday, let’s call that The Novel Launch: Day 1.

But it’s far from a new book, in real terms. My agent has had a draft of THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB since early September, 2004; when I was deciding between agents for my memoir (such a luxury; it really IS wonderful to win a major category in the PNWA contest!), I asked each of them to read the novel, too, to make sure that they would be open to representing ALL of my work. I took it through another two drafts after that.

So why didn’t it hit the market immediately? This may come as a surprise to some of you, but that there is often long-term discussion between a writer and an agent about timing. (The discussion often runs something like this: the author says, “Is it time yet? Is it time yet?” and the agent says, “Not quite.” Repeat often.)

Remember all of those publishing world planned lulls I told you about last fall? The end-of-summer vacations, which can last from the middle of August until after Labor Day; the Frankfurt Book Fair in October; the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas holidays, when everything slows to a grinding halt, so agents and editors can get back to everything they’ve put off from the rest of the year, and the January combination of “Help! We’re buried under every unpublished writer in North America’s New Year’s resolution submissions!” and “Help! All of our tax information for last year must be in order by the end of the month!” All of these affect timing, as does conference season. One week might be a far smarter time to start shopping a book around than the following one.

Also, in my case, the memoir obviously took precedence. It is quite rare that a writer’s agent will be marketing different projects for her simultaneously, and these two projects are very different indeed: one is a memoir about my relationship with a long-dead science fiction writer, and the other is a comedy about the adult lives of children who grew up on a commune in the Oregon Cascades. Or, as my writing group tends to think of them, my beatnik book and my hippie book. Can flappers be far behind?

We’re going to do a limited submission the first time around, which means 6 to 8 hand-picked editors will get to take a gander at the book, people at publishing houses so perfect for me that my agent and I would dance a little jig if they wanted it. (Not all agents who handle fiction do it this way; in fact, it’s more common for agents handling first-time novelists to send out only one submission at a time.) It may be days, weeks, or months before we hear back from any of them.

In the short run, though, I have a million things to do to prepare for this submission, so I am going to run off and do them. Tomorrow, I shall tell you what they were, so you can see for yourself just how much work goes into getting a novel out the door to editors.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

I’ve gotten SO many e-mails from stressed-out contest entrants, responding to my weekend posts about formatting, that I’m not going to write about anything contest-related today. I suspect everyone could use the rest, after (or in the midst of) getting that entry postmarked on time. So today, I’m going back to mega-problems, a little number I like to call the Plot Flare phenomenon, something I can tackle in a fun and nonstress-inducing manner.

Before I move on to nice, soothing manuscript mega-problems again, though, I do want to apologize to everyone who had already entered by the time I mentioned a title page for the entry. Let me be clear: the contest rules do NOT require a title page; a judge will not maul your entry if you did not include one with your entry. Relieved? In this instance, the title page was a cosmetic measure, designed to make your entry look more professional.

However, I do have to say, the reason that I did not mention it until this weekend’s posts was that it actually wouldn’t occurred to me NOT to include a title page in ANY packet that included a manuscript of mine or a portion thereof. All of my elementary short stories had title pages, even. Now, admittedly, I grew up around so many professional writers that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that home sweet home was insulated primarily by paper, but in retrospect, I had to wonder: whence the title page impulse?

When in doubt about the source of my literary prejudices (which, as you may have gathered, are legion), I did what I always do: ask my friends who’ve had success hunting down agents and selling books. Without exception, they were all nonplused by the notion of sending out a piece without a title page, too, unless it was a commissioned article for a magazine, but none of us could recall where we’d picked up that useful little habit. But every writer we know does it. Perhaps this indicative of creeping egomania, but even in a contest entry, where the author is not allowed to display her name, all of us felt that the “Ta da!” of the title page was still advisable, and even necessary.

Which leads me to a corollary question, one that had not occurred to me before: have you all been sending title pages with your requested material submissions to agents and editors? I can’t remember ANY instance where an agent’s submission guidelines actually specified its inclusion, but it does most definitely make your work look more professional, if it’s in standard format. (See last week’s posting on the subject, if you’re in doubt.) And, as in a contest entry, anything you can do to your submission to make it resemble what the pros do gets your work taken more seriously.

Okay, on to Plot Flares, an early screaming indication that something specific is going to happen later in the plot. From the author’s POV, these hints are generally subtle, mild foreshadowing of events to come. As character development and background, small hints are often advisable, or even unavoidable. If these hints aren’t AWFULLY subtle, though, they can give away the rest of the book, deflating suspense as surely as helium comes out of a balloon when you jab a needle into it. And to professional readers, who see every plot twist in the book, so to speak, on a literally daily basis, a poorly-done foreshadowing hint glows in the middle of a page like a flare set up around a midnight highway accident: don’t go there.

Once again, this is a phenomenon familiar to all of us from movies: the eventual startling plot twist is revealed in some small way within the first twenty minutes. There are, of course, the classics: if the female lead faints or mentions putting on weight, she’s going to turn out to be pregnant; if any man announces that he’s counting the days until retirement, he’s going to be killed (and, heaven help us, “Danny Boy” will be played on the soundtrack); if our hero is a sad guy, he will inevitably turn out to have had a beautiful (and often, in the flashback, silent) wife and possibly cherubic child who were slaughtered before his eyes while he watched, helpless. Pathos, pathos. And if you don’t believe me that these clichés transcend genre or even writing quality, that last example was the backstory for the Sidney Poitier character in http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061735/”>GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO (courtesy of Bad Men with Guns). It gets around.

The list is practically endless. In a television detective story, the actor with the best résumé (who therefore cost more than the other players) will turn out to be the murderer; so will Ray Liotta, John Malkevich, Ice-T, and/or Christopher Walken — unless, of course, the directors have elected to incorporate what I like to call the Liotta Lapse, where they use an actor so habitually typecast as the guy you’re SUPPOSED to think did it, so the twist can be that someone else did.

Actually, I’ve always found it rather amusing that people in the movie industry continue to think that we’re all surprised by plot twists set up three miles in advance — in manuscripts, these cliché set-ups tend to be dismissed in the first read-through. I once attended a memorable preview of a forgettable thriller where one of the actors, unfortunately, had shown up to speak to the audience. A fairly well-known TV actor, he swore up and down that the first time he had read the script, he was stunned by the eventual plot twist. When several audience members laughed uproariously (including, I’ll admit it, me), the actor was unwise enough to ask us why. I spoke up: “Because ten minutes into the film, someone mentioned that the guy who turned out to be the murderer ‘had a tough childhood.’ The screenwriter might as well have erected a road sign with a big arrow that read ‘psychopath here.'”

The actor looked at me as if I had just spontaneously derived the theory of relativity from scratch on the spot. “I didn’t catch that,” he claimed.

Now, because I prefer for the sake of the republic to assume that most adults are reasonably intelligent, I assume the actor was lying about his own perceptions in order to protect his film. For such a cause, I can cut him some slack. However, in book form, agents, editors, and contest judges tend not to cut the author of a manuscript any slack at all. Remember, these are not charitable readers, as a rule, but business-oriented ones. They’re looking for plot twists that are genuinely surprising, not set up by plot flares a hundred pages in advance.

Keep your foreshadowing, when you use it, SUBTLE — which means, of course, that unless you’re writing comedy, you might want to avoid having characters say of your politician protagonist in early childhood scenes, “That Harry! Some day, he’s going to be president.: For a hilarious peek at the kind of plot flare to avoid, take a gander at the cult favorite TV series STRANGERS WITH CANDY, a parody of those heavy-handed 1970s Afterschool Specials where a wee Helen Hunt would try drugs once, freak out, and plunge to her death from a second-story window, all to teach us, children, that Drugs are Bad. In STRANGERS, if a pet is going to get killed in order for the protagonist, Jerri Blank, to learn an Important Life Lesson, the script will have Jerri say to her pet, “I would just DIE if anything ever happened to you,” reinforcing it just before the inevitable denouement with “I would like to reiterate that I would just DIE if anything ever happened to you.”

Yes, this is bald-faced, but it’s a fine reminder that good writers let the circumstances lead naturally to dramatically satisfying conflicts and resolutions, rather than sending up plot flares every few pages to make sure that the reader is following along with the point. Because, ultimately, that’s the motivation for plot flares, I think: the author doesn’t trust that the reader is going to be able to figure out the irony.

As a writer, I have to assume that every one of my potential readers is as sharp as I am at picking up those clues. Admittedly, I was the person in the theatre who whispered to my date fifteen minutes into THE SIXTH SENSE, “Why aren’t any of the adults consulting with Bruce Willis about the kid’s case? Totally unrealistic, either in the school system or with the parent. He’s gotta be a ghost,” so we’re talking a rather high bar here, but I like plot twists that make readers gasp ALOUD. If the reader’s been alerted by a flare, that gasp is never going to come, no matter how beautifully the revelation scene is set up. At most, the reader will have a satisfied sense of having figured the twist out in advance.

Keep it subtle, my friends. If there’s a cat in that bag, keep it there until it’s startling for it to pop out. There’s no need to have it meowing all the time first.

And coming off that rather distasteful little metaphor, I bid all of you stressed-out contest entrants au revoir. Get some well-earned sleep, and keep up the good work.

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

I don’t usually post on Saturdays, but this isn’t just any weekend — it’s the last weekend before entries in the 2006 PNWA Literary Contest are due! I know a lot of you will be spending the long weekend polishing up your entries, so I wanted to get a few last words in before you did.

(Can you tell that I would really, really like for blog readers to take the contest by storm this year?)

First, an oversight in yesterday’s post that several sharp-eyed readers (well done!) pointed out to me: when I refer to skipped lines, I am referring to single lines, not double-spaced ones. And in the two standard title page formats, the name and address info is single-spaced. So thank you to those of you who let me know that I had neglected to mention that.

Okay, let’s assume that you’ve finished the basic writing and paperwork for your contest entry — if not, I can only assume that you are either the world’s fastest writer or an incurable optimist. You’ve read and reread your chapter, and it is both grammatically impeccable and one hell of a good story; John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Dorothy Parker would all gnash their venerable teeth, if they still had them, in envy over your storytelling skills. Now it’s time to start asking yourself a few questions, to weed out the more subtle problems that can make the difference between making the finalist list and being an also-ran:

(Some of you may recognize this list from my earlier series on contest entering; yes, I have run it before. However, I noticed that my December postings are not yet archived, so I wanted to make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that everyone who could benefit from this checklist gets to see it.)

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

Yes, I know — I’ve been harping on standard format for months. I’ve also seen a whole lot of contest entries in odd formats, or with standard format in the chapters and single-spaced synopses — to be precise, I have seen them be disqualified. Unless the rules specifically state otherwise, keep EVERYTHING you submit to ANY professionally-geared forum in standard format.

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

This is sort of a trick question for those of you entering the PNWA contest: quick, which page do the rules specify SHOULDN’T be numbered?

Kudos to those of you who said pg. 1. How, you ask does one PREVENT a page number from appearing on the first page of a numbered document? Well, in MS Word, under FORMAT, there is a section called DOCUMENT. Under LAYOUT, you may select “Different first page.” Then go into the HEADER/FOOTER and make sure the first page header doesn’t have a page #.

Alternatively, you could just copy the first page of the entry into a separate document and print it from there. Just because technology is rigid doesn’t mean you have to be.

But no matter how you do it, NUMBER YOUR PAGES.

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

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

(4) Have I included all of the requested elements on the title page? If it asked me to specify genre and/or target market, have I done that? And is it in the same font and type size as the rest of the entry?

This is not the time to experiment with funky typefaces or odd title page formats. Unless the contest rules specify otherwise, put the whole thing in the same typeface AND TYPE SIZE as the rest of the entry. List only the information you are ASKED to list there. (Although if you want to add something along the lines of “An entry in the X Category of the 2006 Y Contest,” that’s generally considered a nice touch.)

(5) If I mention the names of places, famous people, or well-known consumer products, are they spelled correctly?

Okay, if no one else is willing to call foul on this, I will: writers very often misspell proper nouns, possibly because they tend not to be words listed in standard spell-checkers’ dictionaries. In a contest, that’s no excuse. Check.

And when I say check, I don’t mean just ask your spell-checker. To revisit every editor in the world’s pet peeve, most word processing programs are RIFE with misspellings and grammatical mistakes. I use the latest version of MS Word for the Mac, and it insists that Berkeley, California (where I happen to have been born) should be spelled Berkley, like the press. It is mistaken. Yet if I followed its advice and entered the result in a contest, I would be the one to pay for it, not the fine folks at Microsoft.

Double-check.

(6) Have I spell-checked AND proofread?

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

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

Before you boil over about the inequity of it all, though, think about misspellings and grammatical errors from the contest judge’s perspective. The judge cannot tell whether the problem with the entry is that the author can’t spell to save his life, or he hasn’t bothered to proofread — or if some Microsoftie just couldn’t be bothered to check Strunk and White to see when THERE should be used instead of THEIR. (My grammar checker routinely tells me to use the former instead of the latter in cases of collective possession, alas. Is there no justice in this world?) From the judge’s point of view, the author is invariably the one who looks unprofessional.

This doesn’t mean not to spell-check electronically: you should. But you should NEVER rely solely upon a spell-checker or grammar-checker’s wit and wisdom. They’re just not literate enough, and again, it’s just too easy to accept an incorrect change when you’re over-tired. In my undergraduate thesis, my spell-checker saw fit to change my references to “longshoremen’s coalitions” to “longshoremen’s cotillions.” Lord knows what my readers would have made of that, had I not proofread, too. As it is, I have never been able to get the image of burly stevedores mincing around in sparkly Glinda the Good ball gowns out of my poor brain…

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

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

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

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

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

The synopsis, like everything else in your contest entry, is a writing sample, every bit as much as the chapter is. Make sure it lets the judges know that you can write — and that you are professional enough to approach the synopsis as a professional necessity, not a tiresome whim instituted by the contest organizers to satisfy some sick, sadistic whim of their own. (Even in those instances where length restrictions make it quite apparent that there is behind-the-scenes sadism at work. Believe me, writerly resentment shows up BEAUTIFULLY against the backdrop of a synopsis.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, unfortunately, writers of promise, like everybody else, tend to have their work rejected without explanation, so it’s extremely difficult to tell — even after months or years of patient querying — where one’s own work falls on the talent spectrum. To put it as kindly as possible, until you have weeded out all of the non-stylistic red lights from your contest entries, you truly cannot gain a realistic feel for whether you need to work more on your writing or not.

If you are indeed a writer of promise — and I sincerely hope you are — the best thing you can possibly do for your career is to learn to conform your work to professional standards of presentation. This is one of the best reasons to enter contests like the PNWA that give entrants feedback, just as is one of the best reasons to take writing classes and join a writing group: it gives you outside perspective on whether you are hitting the professional bar or not.

Oh, and it helps to be lucky, too.

Best of luck, everybody. Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini