Posted on - No Comments on Telling your life story to the judge, part II

Telling your life story to the judge, part II

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Before I launch into today’s topic, campers, I have a bit of a modification to yesterday’s post. My interview on Dickien.fr is indeed located in the links I listed — here for English and here for French — but in order to leave a comment, readers will need to go to the site’s homepage and click on Commentaires. I know from delightful experience that many of you are inveterate web commenters.

Far be it from me to curtail your freedom of expression. That’s not my style. And frankly, it would be nice for the interviewer to hear that English-speaking readers are interested in my book.

Let’s get back to work.

After yesterday’s post on the advisability of quadruple-checking your memoir entries to make super-sure that they contain NO usages of your first or last name, I believe I heard some murmurs of dissent out there. “Wait just a second,” the voice in the ether I choose to attribute to my readers kept saying, “isn’t this tactic bordering on paranoid overkill? How is the judge ever going to know if I use my name? In a blind-judged contest, the judges never see the author’s name attached to the manuscript, and thus could not know that the name mentioned IS the author’s.”

Well, that’s a good point, disembodied voice. But you still shouldn’t do it for several reasons, all of which boil down to this: are you sure enough about that to risk your entry’s getting disqualified?

First, as I mentioned yesterday, such is the seriousness with which blind judging is taken that if a judge even SUSPECTS that an entry contains the author’s name, that entry may be toast. It doesn’t matter if the judge can GUESS who the author is — since the rules don’t call for complete negation of the memoirist’s identity, all they can catch you on is the use of your name. They watch for it like the proverbial hawks.

But, to be fair, it does not require much of a cognitive leap to conclude that the Sheila Mae who is narrating a memoir excerpt is, in fact, the same Sheila Mae who wrote it.

Second, it is not unheard-of for contests to employ (or, more commonly, impress volunteers into servitude as) initial screeners, whose SOLE function is to check the entries for rule violations before the entries are distributed to the judges who will rate them on more sophisticated bases.

These screeners sometimes do have your entire entry packet – and thus your name, and will be able to tell immediately if you have violated the don’t-use-your-name rule. So there.

Third — and while this one is the simplest, it is also the way self-namers are most often caught == even in a contest that does not pass entries under the watchful eyes of screeners, someone is going to have to slit open that envelope, if only to extract the check. Someone is going to have to note your name in the contest log, assign your entry the identification number that will allow it to be judged blindly, and pass your entry along to the proper section’s judges.

It’s a boring job. So tell me: how likely do you think it is that such a mail-sorter would glance at the first page of the entry, to render the process a trifle less tedious?

And how many memoir first pages have you ever seen that DIDN’T include SOME mention of the memoir subject’s name? I rest my case.

Except to say: I know that my harping on this is going to throw the more conscientious memoirists out there into a frenzy of proofreading. Actually, though, the entry where the writer has obviously made a determined effort to rid the document of his own name but missed a single instasnce is not usually the one that ends up getting disqualified. Oh, it will certainly get marked down, but probably not thrown into the trash.

So what kinds of violations of this rule DO tend to get the entry disqualified on sight? The one where the entrant clearly didn’t bother to read the rules, but simply printed up the already-existing first chapter and submitted it.

You’d be astonished at how common that is — and how obvious it is to the judges. At least, I hope you would be.

There is, as I mentioned yesterday, one absolutely foolproof, not very time-consuming means of avoiding the problem altogether, of course: use a pseudonym within the context of the entry, adding a note on your title page, STATING that you have changed the names in order to adhere to the rules of the contest.

“For the purposes of this entry,” you could write, “I have changed my family name to Parrothead.”

Yes, it’s kind of silly, but that way, you make it pellucidly clear that you’re not referring to yourself. And, after all, how is the judge to know whether you have substituted the names or not, if you do not say so?

Other good tip for memoirists entering their work in contests is to do a bit of market research prior to entry. (Actually, this is a good idea for anyone writing a book, and certainly for everyone who has to write a synopsis for a contest.) Are there memoirs currently on the market — and in case you were not aware of it, for the industry to consider a published book part of the market, a book either has to have been released within the last five years or have been a bestseller within the last ten — similar to yours?

To put it another way, is your memoir in fact absolutely unique, or does it fit into a well-defined market niche? If it’s the latter, is there a way that you can make its individual appeal to that particular segment of the market clearer in the pages you are submitting?

It is a question well worth asking before entering a memoir into a contest – or indeed, before trying to market it at all.

All of us tend to think of our own experiences as unique, which of course they are; every point of view is to a very great extent original. However, every memoir is about something in addition to the personality of the person writing it, right?

The frequency with which books on those other subjects turn up on the shelves of Barnes & Noble is definitely a matter of fashion; there are fads in memoir-writing, just as in any other kind of publishing, and you can bet your boots that if a particular subject matter is hot this year, the nonfiction rolls of every contest in the country will receive quantities of that type of memoir.

Remember, for instance, after Lance Armstrong’s book came out, and suddenly there were a zillion upbeat I-survived-a-lethal-illness memoirs?

Well, so do contest judges: they read thousands of them. Which meant, in practical terms, that it was quite a bit harder to wow a judge with an illness memoir in that period than at any other time in human history.

Also, certain life experiences tend to recur across a population with predictable regularity, and if you are writing about a well-trodden topic, it is IMPERATIVE that you make it clear in your contest entry PRECISELY how your book is different from the others currently on the market.

Because – and I tremble to tell you this, but it’s true – if you are writing on certain over-mined topics, even the most heart-felt prose can start those cliché warning bells pealing in the average judge’s brainpan.

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

Before you bemoan this, recall that not only do agents, editors, and contest judges get tired of seeing the same types of books over and over again; so do readers. Think about how many people suddenly started writing accounts of growing up poor immediately after ANGELA’S ASHES hit the big time, or about over-medicated, over-sexed teenagerhoods in the wake of PROZAC NATION, and plan accordingly.

Sheer repetition can wear down even the most conscientious judge after a while; remember, most contest judges do not judge a single contest only, but return year after year. Certain topics are perennial contest entry favorites.

The result? “Oh, God,” the judge whimpers, instinctively backing away from the papers in front of her, “not another well-written, emotionally rich story about a Baby Boomer daughter nursing her mother through her final illness, and in the process learning to heal the long-standing rift between them!”

Not that any of these judges have anything against women who care for their aging parents; nor is anyone is rooting for those life-long disagreements NOT to be mended. But honestly, after fifteen or twenty of these in a single year’s crop of entries — that’s not an exaggeration, incidentally — a judge does start to long for a nice entry about, say, someone who was mauled by a tiger. Or hit by lightning.

Or at least not following in the wheeltracks of Lance Armstrong.

Conditioned reflex, I’m afraid. Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the sound of a bell, and contest judges wince at the sight of the third similar entry of the day. That’s just the way they’re built.

So if you happen to be any of the following, you might want to give some serious thought to how your book ISN’T like the others: a former drug addict/alcoholic/workaholic rediscovering the beauty of day-to-day life; a former hippie/swinger/disco queen recounting his or her glory days; your magnificent weight loss or gain and how that journey made you a better person; a teacher from a white, upper-middle-class background who went to teach in the inner city; a new father confessing that he was not prepared for the practicalities of caring for children; a new mother discovering that motherhood is significantly harder than it is cracked up to be; anyone who worked at a dot com that went bust.

And any reworking of the concepts of THE DA VINCI CODE or the bestsellers of last year.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t bother to enter memoirs that encroach upon these well-trodden areas. You should, if that is the story you burn to tell.

But alert the judge to the ways your book is different and better as soon as possible: on page one of the entry, if you can, and within the first few paragraphs of the synopsis. And don’t just SAY that your book is unique: SHOW it.

For instance, if your memoir details your spiritual awakening, your discovery that the giant corporation for which you worked is corrupt — because, you know, that’s always a surprise — you might want to invest some time in market research to figure out how to make your book come across as fresh and exciting to jaded professional readers.

How? Well, if you check a well-stocked bookstore, or even run your subject matter through an Amazon search, you will get a pretty firm idea of how many other accounts there are that resemble your own, at least superficially.

Some of you are feeling a trifle grumpy at this prospect, aren’t you? I can’t say as I blame you, really. Try to
think of this research as practice for writing that inevitable book proposal.

(All of you memoirists are aware that memoirs are seldom sold on the entire book, right? I keep running into memoir-writers to whom this is news, so I will go ahead and say it: it is not necessary to have a completed memoir before selling it to a publishing house. As with other NF books, the average memoir book proposal contains only a chapter or two — and a WHOLE lot of marketing material.)

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

If a reasonably intelligent judge could make it through your memoir entry without being able to answer these questions, you should probably consider a spot of revision before you mail off the entry.

“But wait!” I hear some of you cry. “My book may be on a common topic, but my literary voice is unique! But I can hardly say in my synopsis, this book is different from others on the market because it is better-written, without sounding like a jerk, can I?”

Well, no, but unfortunately, if you are writing about a common experience, you also probably cannot get away with assuming that the writing alone will differentiate it from the other submissions. Again, if there’s recently been a bestseller along similar lines as yours, yours will almost certainly not be the only entry that resembles it.

To put it another way, you can’t be certain that the finding a sense of wholeness after the death of a loved one memoir that the judge read immediately before yours was not written by Emily Brontë and Gustave Flaubert’s oddly gifted spiritual love child, can you?

Sad but true, if you are writing on a common topic, the bar automatically goes higher, alas, for making YOUR story stand out amongst the rest. You really have to knock their socks off, to an extent that you might not if your topic were not popular that year.

Sorry.

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

Yes, yes, I know: I’m asking a lot of you here, but I’m positive that you can do this.

You want to know how I know? Because a writer with the staggering courage and honestly to write a truly self-revealing memoir, rather than one that simply makes the self look good, is a writer who has had to master many subtle writing skills. Call me zany, but compared to laying your soul bare on paper, doing a little market research and a bit of book promotion is a walk in the park.

Not a very pleasant park, true, but still, not a minefield. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on More contest entry bugbears: what’s in a name?

More contest entry bugbears: what’s in a name?

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Anne contemplates her past at Harvard.

Before I launch into today’s topic, I wanted to give you all a heads-up about an interview I have just given to that excellent French Philip K. Dick fansite, Dickien.fr on the subject of my long-delayed memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK. For those of you who have been curious about the book (and the hold-up), this interview may answer a few questions.

Charmingly, they’ve posted it both in English and in French. I got a big kick out of that. It’s not the first time my work has been published in other tongues (I wrote for a Dutch magazine, briefly), but it IS the first time it’s been in a language I can read. It makes me sound very soigné.

Fair warning: over the last few years, most of my attempts to tell the story behind my memoir (or, to put it another way, my life before the age of 15) have resulted in nasty lawsuit threats. The question of whether I own my memories or a small corporation does is, in addition to a fabulous-sounding premise for a Philip K. Dick novel, the central fact of my writing life of late.

Call it a literary identity crisis.

In keeping with the theme of the interview, this seems like the natural moment to concentrate for a post upon a category dear to my heart: memoir. As a past PNWA Zola Award winner for best nonfiction book/memoir — for an early draft of the book mentioned above, as it happens — I have a thing or two to say on what does and doesn’t tend to make a memoir entry sing.

So let’s get right to it, shall we? Because I have been concentrating upon technicalities for the past few days, let me begin with the most important one for memoir — and the one most frequently violated:

please, I implore you, if you are submitting a memoir entry to a blind-judged contest, FOLLOW THE RULE ABOUT NOT HAVING YOUR OWN NAME APPEAR ANYWHERE IN THE MANUSCRIPT. And do bear in mind that this applies to EITHER your first OR your last name.

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

Seriously, memoirists run afoul of this rule all the time, for the exceedingly simple reason that their names tend to appear a whole lot more often in their work than, say, a SF writer’s would in his. (Philip is a notable exception, of course; he created fictional characters with permutations of his own name all the time.) It’s pretty easy to overlook a single reference to the protagonist in a book that’s written in the first person.

Unless, of course, you are writing anonymously, or under a pseudonym. Even then, it is a good idea to add a note on the title page, saying something along the lines of:

since the contest forbids mention of the author’s name, I have substituted “Billie Bartolucci” throughout.

Billy Bartolucci, incidentally, was an immense linebacker at my high school, sweet enough to get a big kick out of the fact that the girls in the drama club used to claim that they were Miss Billie when some ne’er-do-well asked for their names and phone numbers. Billy sounded like Darth Vader on the phone, so the effects were sometimes dramatic.

But I digress. For those of you who have not yet tread the memoir path (which is, I notice, more or less de rigeur for a novelist who hopes to win the Nobel Prize someday), it’s practically impossible NOT refer to yourself by name in the story of your own life. Contest judges are aware of that, and become accordingly eagle-eyed.

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

As usual, it all comes down to time.

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

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

Make yourself comfortable; I’m going to tell you a little story about where such cleverness might lead. I went to college with Danny, a very clever, very ambitious writer who periodically contributed pieces to the on-campus humor magazine. Now, it was the practice of the magazine to publish all of its pieces without bylines, to encourage collaboration amongst members of the writing club.

But as I said, Danny was ambitious: he, like many of the other writers in the club, was anxious to graduate with clippings he could use to promote his work later on.

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

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

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

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

And that single reference, to a judge who was looking to pounce upon contest rule violations, could get a memoir entry disqualified.

Yes, even though it would be highly unlikely, without the judge’s having the list of memoir entrants by his side for first-name cross-referencing purposes, for the judge to guess the author’s identity. Simply the implication that the author might have referred to himself can appear to be a rule violation.

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

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

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

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

Let’s say the memoir’s author is named Biddy MacAlister-Thames, not a name anyone’s eye is likely to encounter on a page without noticing. Naturally, a simple search-and-replace could weed out uses of the name, but late at night, just before a contest deadline, slips do occur.

Luckily, these slips tend to concentrate within certain contexts. Biddy should check her entry especially carefully in the following scenes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m funny that way. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Contest entry formatting, continued: three cheers for the emperor of ice cream!

Contest entry formatting, continued: three cheers for the emperor of ice cream!

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I’ve been yammering all week about the importance of reading contest entry requirements as if the fate of the Western world depended upon your following each and every one, but the fact is, in many contests, the rules are far from clear. And no, this is not usually because contest rule designers are just itching to trip you up.

Really. Honest.

In practice, a contest that has been around for a while has probably modified its rules over time — and since in the U.S., the reputable literary contests tend to be run by volunteer organizations, it’s not unheard-of for one board member to add a new rule in response to a specific situation that arose in last year’s contest, another to have inserted two the year before…without anyone concerned realizing that someone needs to go through every so often and make sure that the new collection of rules makes sense.

Which, to their credit, the Contest-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named seems to have done between last year and this. It’s almost as though someone posted a fairly extensive online critique last year — and they responded to it. Entrants everywhere should be happy about this, I think. (But they may be less happy about the fact that this organization has reduced the number of finalists in every category by two from last year.)

But even with the best intentions, contest rules are seldom written so clearly that someone who has absolutely no experience with how the industry likes to see manuscripts could figure out the rules with certainty on the first read-through. In fact, I suspect that if you asked most contest organizers and judges, they would be flabbergasted at the suggestion that writers who haven’t been submitting their work fairly regularly to agents, editors, and magazines would be entering their contest at all.

If you doubt this, take a gander at most literary contests’ rules: most of the time, specific expectations are compressed under terse statements such as, “Submit in industry standard format.”

That should make those of you who have been hanging out on this site for a while feel pretty darned good about yourselves — because, believe me, having some idea what standard format should look like, or even that such a thing exists, places you several furlongs in front of aspiring writers who do not. (If you fall into the latter category, run, don’t walk to the STANDARD FORMAT BASICS category at right.) Because — correct me if your experience contradicts this — this is an industry that tends to conflate lack of professional knowledge with lack of artistic talent.

And that is as true for contest entries as for submissions to agents.

That’s why, in case you have been wondering, I harp on standard format so much here. No one is born aware of how the industry expects to see writing presented, but the rules are seldom shared with those new to the game — and almost never explained in much detail. Admittedly, sometimes one sees the rules asserted in an aggressive do this or fail! tone, but it’s pretty difficult to apply a rule unless you know what it’s for and how it should be implemented.

That’s my feeling about it, anyway. Call me zany, but I would rather see all of you judged on the quality of your WRITING than on whether your manuscript or contest entry adheres to a set of esoteric rules. But unless it does conform to those (often unspoken) rules, it’s just not going to look professional to someone who is used to reading top-of-the-line work.

So try to think of quadruple-checking those rules as the necessary prerequisite to getting a fair reading for your writing — and bear in mind that most judges will expect the author of that winning entry to have been hanging around the industry for a good long time.

The two categories where this expectation is most evident are screenwriting and poetry. Almost any contest that accepts screenplays will use the same draconian standard that the average script agent does: if it’s not in positively the right format (and in the standard typeface for screenplays, Courier), it will be rejected on sight.

Now, I’m going to be honest with you here: I am not a screenwriter; I’m just thrilled that the WGA strike was settled. So if you are looking for guidance on how to prep a screenplay entry, I have only one piece of advice for you:

GO ASK SOMEONE WHO DOES IT FOR A LIVING.

Sorry to be so blunt, but I don’t want any of my readers to be laboring under the false impression that this is the place to pick up screenplay formatting tips. Happily, there are both many, many websites out there just packed with expert advice on the subject, and good screenwriting software is easily and cheaply available. I would urge those of you with cinema burning in your secret souls to rush toward both with all possible dispatch.

I can speak with some authority about poetry formatting, however.

Remember how I mentioned yesterday that where contest rules are silent, their organizers generally assume that writers will adhere to standard format — which is to say, the form that folks who publish that kind of writing expect submitters to embrace? Well, that’s true for poetry as well.

So what does standard format for poetry look like? Quite a bit as you’d expect, I’d expect:

* Single-spaced lines within a stanza

* A skipped line between stanzas

* Left-justified text, with a ragged right margin

* Centered title on the first line of the page

* 1″ margins on all sides of the page

* 12-point typeface on white paper, printed on only one side of the page

In other words, it shouldn’t be formatted the way you might see it in a book, where the left margin might be a few inches in, or on a greeting card, where the text floats somewhere closer to the center of a page. Basically, the average poetry submission looks like this, to borrow a manuscript page from a favorite poet of mine, Wallace Stevens:

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Pretty straightforward, eh? (I love that poem, by the way. I almost named my memoir about my relationship with Philip K. Dick THE EMPEROR OF ICE CREAM. Makes more sense than the title my erstwhile publisher picked, doesn’t it?)

Now let’s see what how a contest rules might call for something slightly different. To pick one set at random, let’s take that nameless contest whose deadline is next week:

* Submit three complete poems.

* Single-space within stanza, double-space between stanzas.

* Maximum length of collection: 3 pgs.

* Use 12pt Times New Roman or Times (Mac).

Those are all of the category-specific rules listed. Elsewhere, however, others pop up, some from rather far afield:

* One-sided 8 1/2 x 11 standard WHITE paper.

* 1” margins all around.

* Have the title of the submission and page numbers located in the upper right hand corner of each page.

* Each submission MUST show the name of the category to which it is submitted.

Okay, what can we learn from this? Any occasion for our pal Wallace to panic about the breadth of necessary changes to his already-formatted poem?

Not really. Oh, the rules seem pretty hostile to the notion that any worthwhile poem could possibly be longer than a single page (take that, Lord Byron!), as well as unaware that Word for Mac does in fact feature the Times New Roman font — and has for many years. But otherwise, there’s not a lot here that ol’ Wallace is going to have to change.

EXCEPT, of course, for taking his name out of the slug line and moving it to the other side of the page.

Do I hear some confused muttering out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you point out, and who could blame you? “What about needing to place the title in the slug line? Each of the three less-than-page-long poems will have a different title, won’t it?”

Great question, unseen mutterers. I’ll complicate it further: in the rules for book-length works, there’s an additional regulation that may apply here:

* The Contest Category name and number (e.g. Category 3: Romance Genre) on the first page of the submission and on the mailing envelope.

Yes, yes, it DOES appear in the section of the rules that apply to categories other than poetry — but tell me, do you want YOUR entry to be the one that tests whether the Contest-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named’s organizers don’t think this rule should apply to the poetry category?

I didn’t think so. If I were a poet, I certainly would not omit scrawling Category 9: Poetry on the outside of my entry envelope.

You, of course, are free to do as you wish. But remember how I demonstrated yesterday that adding a title page can help smooth over quite a few little logistical problems? Look what happens to the opening of our pal Wallace’s entry if he takes that advice to heart:

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Both of these pages are in Times New Roman, incidentally, created on a Mac. (Hey, I couldn’t resist.)

More to the point, ol’ Wallace has now neatly avoided any rule violations. Oh, he could have given his collection of poetry (if a mere three poems can legitimately be called a collection; if he were a collector of, say, teapots, he would be considered merely a hobbyist collector if he had only three) a more exciting overarching title, but this gets the job done.

It also satisfies the contest’s rule requiring that the title be in the slug line, along with the page number. What’s not to like?

Amazing what a lot of explanation a seemingly simple set of rules can engender, isn’t it? Keep combing through those contest rules, potential entrants, and everybody, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on May I ask for your indulgence?

May I ask for your indulgence?

My, but there have been a lot of questions posted as comments on old posts lately! I love getting the questions, but they do take quite a bit of time to answer. It’s pushing my new blog posting times later and later.

So no, it’s not your imagination: I have been posting a lot in the dead of night lately, and for health reasons, I would prefer not to see that trend continue. (My doctor seconds this, by the way, in a much, much bossier tone.)

Since the higher volume of questions seems to be a phenomenon that’s here to stay, and as we are just heading into contest season, I would like to make a preemptive request: if you have contest-related questions, PLEASE post them AT LEAST a week before the entry deadline. Please, too, try to give at least double that lead time for submission-related questions.

That way, I won’t need to worry that a few days’ delay in answering a complex question will cause undue problems on the asker’s end.

Honestly, I do sit up at night fretting about such things. (My doctor HATES that.)

Believe me, I completely understand having a last-minute pre-submission panic about a detail, but while the blog is always here, I’m actually not logged into the website all that much on any given workday. I also occasionally take a day off, have days with thirty posted questions, or only have just barely enough time in a given day to write a blog without also answering questions. Sometimes, I’m just plain in a cranky mood.

Then again, I often get questions that really deserve a blog post of their very own. These typically go on a great big list to wait their day of glory. Sometimes, as we have seen, the sheer length of that list and my frequent series can mean a rather long delay before I can get to a particular topic. As in months.

In short, please be aware that I may not always be able to respond as quickly as a questioner might like — which is one reason that I’ve been adding more and more specific categories to the list at right, to ease a deadline-pressed reader’s ability to find quick answers. Allowing lead time will maximize everyone’s happiness, and isn’t that what a good community is about?

Thanks for helping me out with this. Keep those great questions coming — and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 5 Comments on Picking the right literary contest for you, part IV: it’s all about me, me, me

Picking the right literary contest for you, part IV: it’s all about me, me, me

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If I had to pick a single piece of advice to summarize yesterday’s blog, it would be this: if you are going to hang your agent-finding hopes — and your resources — on an array of contests, it honestly does pay to be selective. In this series, I have been going over what you can do to figure out which contests are and are not for you.

Obviously, the ideal outcome of your winning a contest would be a situation like mine: talent and hard work recognized (if I do say so myself), signing with an agent within the next couple of months, and selling the book in question to a publisher six months after that…but I am sorry to tell you, my results were not the norm.

I was, in a word, lucky. Thank you, Whomever.

Well, okay, it wasn’t JUST luck. I pitched to every agent at that conference who would deign to look at me for thirty consecutive seconds — and I maximized my chances of success by doing my homework before I entered the contest.

At the time, the Organization-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named had a well-earned reputation for bending over backwards to help its contest winners hook up with agents and editors. Not only were finalists clearly and vibrantly marked at the conference with rainbow-colored ribbons so agents and editors know who they are, but the winners in each category were invited to have breakfast with all of the agents and editors, where each winner was expected to stand up and give a universal pitch. Also, the top three entries in each category were displayed in the lobby at the conference, where everybody could read them.

This level of support is unusual, however. I’ve been to many conferences where contest finalists are not identified at all, and other conference attendees are far more likely to meet a finalist than any of the attending agents.

I find this is counter-intuitive, as most conference-related contests actively encourage their finalists to trek to the awards ceremony — and, after all, a contest only gains in stature when its winners go on to get published. You’d think that sheer self-interest would prompt them to take the extra step of making a few critical introductions, but often, they do not.

See why it might be a very, very good idea to check out a conference over and above its formal offerings before you attend it?

Because — and I hate to say this, because good literary conferences are a blessing to humanity, and the volunteers who pull them together deserve candy and roses from all of us — there are conferences out there that exist primarily for the enrichment and/or self-aggrandizement of their organizers.

No, Virginia, not all literary conferences — or contests, for that matter — are organized by the Muses and attendant cherubim for the pure advancement of Art. Some are — brace yourself, old girl — organized by mere mortals with agendas.

And although I hate to be the one to break it to you, sometimes that agenda is pretty transparently to permit the conference’s organizers to rub elbow patches with the speakers, agents, and editors at the expense of allowing attendees access to them.

Those of you who have attended snooty literary conferences know what I’m talking about, right? I’ve been to conferences where the glitterati were whisked away from the attendees so fast that the keynote speaker barely had time to choke down his rubber chicken at the banquet.

Call me zany, but if I’m going to plunk down the dosh to attend a conference, particularly one far away, I don’t particularly want to be relegated to the kids’ table while the organizers hobnob with the agents and editors at the Important People’s table, if ne’er the twain will meet.

Or are whisked off to private parties on some board member’s yacht, far away from anyone who might conceivably have come to the conference to pitch.

Or — not that I have a specific conference in mind here or anything — where the agents and editors are given so much alcohol so often throughout the course of the conference that some of them just don’t show up for pitching appointments.

Somebody catch Virginia, please; I think she’s just fainted again.

Any of these phenomena is a pretty good indication that a conference is not as focused upon hooking writers up with the people who could help them as one might hope — and since many literary contests are directly tied to conferences, it’s worth your while to visit one of the big writers’ forums to ask former attendees about how much access writers actually have.

Ideally, of course, you’d ask someone who has WON the contest in question, but if you’re looking for formal events that will bring you all decked in your winner’s laurels into the presence of the agent of your dreams, you can also try calling the organization sponsoring the contest and asking about access.

If that seems too direct and/or confrontational, you could always just post a question on one of the big writers’ forums’ conference pages, asking where the agents and editors tend to hang out at that conference. If the answer is the bar, you’re probably okay.

Why? Well — chant it with me now, long-time readers — there is pretty much always a bar within 100 yards of any writers’ conference; the combined ghosts of Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald must howl unmercifully into the ears of any organizers who do not book halls in this manner. So historically, the free mingling of the insiders and the undiscovered at conference bars is one of the great democratic institutions of the literary world.

At a conference where the agents, editors, and speakers do not hang out at that nearby bar — i.e., in public — it’s usually a whole lot harder for a writer who wants to pitch to track ‘em down.

The writers’ grapevine can be very informative about this. If the agents and editors are not available because they are cloistered in private meetings with aspiring writers, or because they are having breakfast with contest winners like you, that’s one thing; that might be a good reason to enter the conference’s contest.

But if they’re nowhere to be seen because the local bigwig thriller writer has carried them off to his beach house the moment they stepped off the airplane, or because there’s a party in a locked hotel room that paying attendees know nothing about…well, let’s just say that the conference’s organizers will probably make better connections there than the writer who takes second place in the literary contest.

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

This is not being pushy; it’s being prepared. If your name badge at the conference will be delivered to you pre-marked as a finalist, for instance, you might want to bring your own big blue ribbon to attach to it.

A sneakier way to find out how winners are treated in a conference-tied contest is to talk to NON-finalists who have attended the conference in question. Where the winners are treated extremely well, other attendees tend to notice – sometimes to the extent of being unhappy about what they perceive to be biased treatment.

I’m quite serious about this. If your mole says, “My God, the agents there wouldn’t give the time of day to anyone who didn’t have a top ten entry!” it’s a good bet that the winners get some enviable perks.

I’d enter that contest — but not attend the attached conference unless I was up for a prize.

Because, really, why? There are plenty of conferences that will demonstrate my profit motive in pursuing my writing equally well, where I will get more out of the experience. (If that reference puzzled you, please see yesterday’s post.)

And, honestly, didn’t all of us experience enough negative contact with cliques in junior high school to last us a lifetime? Why cultivate more?

It’s also a good idea to check out the list of your category’s winners from three or more years ago: how many of these writers can you find on a basic web search or by checking Amazon?

More to the point, do any of them show up as clients on agency websites? Or, for more recent winners, as debut book sales on Publishers’ Marketplace?

In other words, are this contest’s winners getting published afterward?

How past winners fared is an excellent indication of how you might make out if you win. However, try not to be overzealous: checking last year’s winners, or the ones from two years ago, is not entirely fair, as publication seldom occurs in less than a year after a book deal is signed.

An organization that supports its contest winners will usually be proud of them, so information about the subsequent successes of past winners is generally quite easy to obtain. If the sponsoring organization does not have a website listing member and past winner triumphs, try to scare up a chatty volunteer in the organization’s office.

How might a shy person go about inducing chattiness? Ask the volunteer what she writes, and if she has ever entered the contest herself. If she has, you’ll probably get an earful; it’s a safe bet that anyone who volunteers for a writers’ organization writes, but almost nobody thinks to ask the receptionist.

This same logic applies at most political campaigns, by the way: everyone who calls wants to speak to the bigwigs, but for organizational dirt, you can hardly do better than chatting up the dear white-haired retiree who devotes four hours per week to licking envelopes.

This may seem pushy, but most contest-running organizations will have a volunteer or staffer return phone calls and e-mails as a matter of course — see if you can elicit boasting about their post-contest success stories. Ask who their favorite winner was, and why. Ask if the organization sponsors readings for the winners, publishes excerpts, or offers other goodies to successful entrants.

Do I hear some of you groaning out there? “Anne,” protesting voices cry, “when are you going to stop with the research assignments, already? You want us to hunt down who represents what, the writing norms in our individual genres, and now the track records of contests in getting their winners’ work published. When will it end, oh Lord, when?”

Okay, okay, I’ll cop to it: I do advise doing a heck of a lot more homework than your average writing guru. I have seen time and again, though, that in the long run, investing the time to target submissions — be it to a contest, agency, or small press — actually shortens the path for an agent-seeking writer. It minimizes the expenditure of energy pursuing leads that turn out not to be all that helpful.

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

I’m not going to throw you into the research pond without a paddle, however. Next time, I shall talk about evaluating the benefits contests offer non-winners — which, like the contests themselves, vary wildly.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 9 Comments on Picking the right literary contest for you, part III: keeping your eyes on the prize

Picking the right literary contest for you, part III: keeping your eyes on the prize

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After yesterday little Enlightenment rhapsody on the inevitability of progress in the face of prejudice, I scoured my picture files for a high-minded photograph to ease us back into the practicalities of my contest-entry series. Almost suspiciously artistic, that cloud arrangement, isn’t it?

As you may perhaps have guessed from the encroaching shadow, I took this photo from inside an airplane. I looked up from the manuscript I was editing (long flights are tremendous for the concentration, I find to find that the sky over the Great Lakes was carrying on like an expressionist exhibition. If you’re going to be dramatic, go for broke, I always say.

Before I went on my sojourn east, I had posted a few tips on how to determine whether to enter any specific contest or not. I intimated, in my long-patented winsome way, that it would behoove you to do a little background research before you invest time and money in entry fees.

Contrary to popular belief amongst writers, there is more to consider before entering a literary contest than whether the piece you’ve chosen to submit is ready for tough judging scrutiny.

Although I must add swiftly, on behalf of every current and former contest judge in North America: NO piece of writing is ready to be submitted to a competition unless it has been thoroughly proofread.

No exceptions.

I’m quite serious about this: it’s rare to see a contest entry that isn’t rife with spelling, grammatical, formatting, or even coherence errors. And that drives your garden-variety conference judge positively mad.

Why, you ask? Well, judges tend to want to find the winning entry in their assigned pile; it’s kind of a thrill. So there are few judging experiences more trying than reading a terrifically creative, well-written entry that absolutely cannot make it to the finals because the writer mistakenly used the wrong form of there, they’re, or their.

I would advise proofing in hard copy, which probably doesn’t come as much of a shock to anybody who has been reading this blog for more than a month. It’s also a good idea to have eyes other than your own search for grammar, spelling, and logic mistakes.

But please, I beg you, do NOT assume that your word processor’s spelling and grammar checker will take care of it for you. As any editor, freelance or otherwise, will rend his garments and tell you, such ostensibly helpful functions often both miss mistakes that would be caught by the naked eye and suggest word substitutions that are either inappropriate or grammatically incorrect.

But I digress. In my last post in this series, I hinted, gently by my standards, that before you plunk down the green, you might want to ask yourself a few pointed questions about the contest you intend to enter. Such as:

– Is the contest credible enough that past winners have gotten published?
– Has the contest been around long enough that agents and editors will have heard of it?
– How good are the benefits for the winners?
– If it’s run by an organization, does it have a track record for awarding outside its membership?
– Do the judges or their students tend to win their own contests?
– Has it historically been plagued by scandals?
– Would winning or placing in this contest give me notoriety or resources that are worth the investment of entering?

In short, you might want to begin to think of entering literary contests as an investment in your future as a writer, rather than as a gamble that may pay off big time. There are good investments, and there are bad investments, so select carefully.

In case you’re new to the contest game, prepping the average entry usually involves quite a bit more effort than merely printing out your first chapter and already-existing synopsis. (Which is usually all that competitions for unpublished book-length works allow a writer to submit, incidentally.)

There’s the time to find the contest in the first place, for instance, which isn’t always easy — contests for unpublished book-length works are actually comparatively rare. Competitions that accept short stories, essays, and/or poetry are much more common, but if you are trying to market a book-length work, entering these can involve embarking upon entirely new writing projects.

Then, too, it can take quite a bit of time and energy to prepare a winning entry — and in case you’re interested, most contests are set up so that it would be impossible to print up one’s existing synopsis and first chapter, pop it into an envelope, and call it good. There are generally formatting restrictions and length requirements that render it advisable to spend some fairly serious time tailoring the pages to the contest’s standards.

All of this is time-consuming, naturally. Potentially, a writer could spend so much time entering contests that she ends up with very little time to write.

Yes, I’ve seen it happen. I once met a very gifted writer at an artists’ colony who had stretched two excellent and atmospheric short stories into eight solid years of contest wins, writer’s residencies, and successful grant applications. Of our four subsidized weeks at the colony, she was writing grants for three.

Not entirely coincidentally, at the point that I first encountered her, she had been working on the same novel for — you guessed it — eight interminable years.

If her initial goal had been to live the life of a writer at minimal expense, I wouldn’t have a serious problem with her strategy. But I suspect that her initial goal had been to use the competitions to finance writing her novel.

To be blunt about it, contest preparation requires time you could be using to write. Or query. Or even have a life, as I’m told that non-writers do. If you choose to spend your time entering a contest instead, make sure that the potential returns are worth the sacrifice.

Then there’s the money.

Entry fees can be quite hefty, especially cumulatively, and not all contests give much in the way of tangible rewards, even to the winners, much less the finalists. A high entry fee may be worth it if, say, the judges provide written feedback or if finalists are given special access to the agents and editors who attend the contest-giving organization’s conference.

Look beyond the contest’s website for confirmation, however; not all contests are created equal, and feedback on entries varies widely. A big hint that a contest may not be all that it’s cracked up to be is a separate fee for feedback — in a credible contest, the judges should be evaluating every entry, not just the ones sent in with extra cash attached.

There is a hidden fringe benefit to shelling out the dosh for entry fees, however: systematic contest entries, like attending conferences and send out rafts of cover letters on a regular basis, are a way that you may prove that you are pursuing your writing as a business venture, rather than as a hobby.

Do I hear some quizzical huffing out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you protest, “in what context would I possibly need to prove that? Should I be anticipating some great cosmic tribunal on how I spent my time on earth?”

Actually, I was thinking of an inquisition a trifle closer to home: the Internal Revenue Service. If you file a Schedule C as a writer (and if you expend resources on developing your writing career, it’s something to consider, even if your writing is not bringing in any income yet), contest entry fees are potentially both tax-deductible AND evidence that you’re actively trying to land an agent and sell your work.

Hey — contest entry is legitimate promotion for your book; it’s a demonstrably good way to catch an agent’s attention. And contrary to popular belief (it’s rearing its ugly head quite often today, isn’t it?), you don’t necessarily have to make money writing in any given year in order to take tax deductions on writing-related expenses.

Frankly, this sometimes comes as something of a surprise to the average tax preparer. I know many writers who have been told point-blank by their consumer-minded tax guys not to bother filing a Schedule C until the first advance check arrives.

So you might want to bone up on the facts a bit before you enter into that particular discussion with your tax advisor — and you honestly should consult one before you file. (To repeat my standard disclaimer, I am not a tax specialist, nor do I play one on TV. Talk to a pro.) To help prepare for that important conversation, here’s a nice brief summary of how writers’ taxes work.

I’m told by thems as know, though, that the IRS has changed its thinking about how quickly to expect artists to make money, recognizing that many talented writers NEVER make a profit on their writing, or even break even, yet still have legitimate business expenses. Printer cartridges, for instance. Reams of paper. The most recent agents’ guide. Conference fees. And so forth. (Poets & Writers online has a good article on recognizing what your writing expenses actually are.)

What they look for, I’m told, to differentiate between the hobbyist writer and the professional, is evidence of a “profit motive” — proof that you are pursuing your writing in a professional manner, with the ultimate goal of selling your work for profit.

Basically, they want to have some reasonable assurance that you WOULD be selling your work if anyone would buy it.

What kind of proof do they like? Well, again, you should ask a tax pro familiar with artists, but high up on the hit parade is evidence that you write on a regular basis and tangible evidence that you are consistently trying to find an agent and/or a publisher for your writing. So they not only don’t begrudge writers’ deducting the cost of stamps and envelopes — they regard buying the makings of SASEs as a mark of serious, potentially taxable effort.

It’s nice that someone does, no? Perhaps the IRS would send a representative to explain your profit motive to your carping coworkers who keep asking when your book is coming out.

Another way to prove that you really are writing with the intent to sell it, honest, is thorough making demonstrable efforts to increase your professional skills — which, for a writer, means not only learning better craft, but learning how to market as well. Continuing education efforts such as going to conferences and promotional efforts like entering contests fit very clearly within the profit-seeking rubric.

I mention this not only so you can make some inquiries in the months between now and tax time, but also to encourage you to apply the concept of the profit motive to any writing-related expense you may be considering.

In the case of a contest, for instance, you might want to ask: how will winning it help me get my book published? In other words, is entering this contest an efficient way to pursue my profit motive as a writer?

And I’m not just talking about contest wins in general here: I’m talking about any PARTICULAR contest you may be considering entering. The adulation and opportunities offered the winners vary so widely from contest to contest that it is almost impossible to generalize about any benefit accruing to all winners.

Other than boasting rights in query letters, of course.

If you do some basic checking in advance, you can save yourself quite a bit in entry fees by avoiding the contests that will not help promote you and your work.

Tomorrow, I shall talk about some ways you might go about accomplishing that. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 11 Comments on All that glitters is not…oh, wait, it is

All that glitters is not…oh, wait, it is

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I’m just back from spending the weekend at Harvard, my alma mater, giving a talk about my memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK. It was, amazingly enough, the first time I’ve spoken about the memoir in public — as in EVER — although I have given a scant handful of print, web, and film interviews since the book was supposed to have come out in 2006. (For those of you who arrived at this community after that furor, a $2 million lawsuit threat had stalled the publication process ever since.)

Well, okay, perhaps that isn’t quite accurate. Since I went there in the 1980s and I possess ovaries, technically, I went to Harvard/Radcliffe; the boys went to Harvard. Seriously, they didn’t start giving male and female graduates the same diploma until just a few years ago.

Not that we chicks minded that or anything.

The Radcliffe part, in case you’re interested, is an homage to 18th-century British novelist Ann Radcliffe, who more or less invented the Gothic potboiler, the pulp fiction of her day. She’s best known today as the author of the works that Jane Austen parodied in NORTHANGER ABBEY, but at the height of her popularity, she apparently sent 50 pounds to Harvard along with the suggestion that they might want to consider admitting women. About a century later, they got around to it.

As time passes, an alumna begins to get dismissive about the Harvard mystique, I notice. Okay, it’s a good school, even a great one, depending upon what one wants to study, but to deserve its reputation, wouldn’t plush red carpets have to be rolled out under students’ feet as they passed, showers of jewels float about them whilst they study, and Nobel laureates chat casually with them at every meal?

I mean, really: we’re talking about the same amenities that other campuses have, right, libraries and professors, just with more money behind them than most?

And then I revisited my old dorm. The picture above shows the entryway to the dining hall.

Yes, those walls ARE made of gold, thank you very much, and during my sophomore year, I lived upstairs from the poet Seamus Heaney. To be fair, though, at the time, he was almost ten years away from winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. But he did occasionally drop by my table to chat at lunch.

Oh, and the libraries were pretty good, too.

My talk was at Vericon, for those of you who did not become heartily sick of my squawking about it last week, the annual convention sponsored by the Harvard/Radcliffe Science Fiction Association. As a founding member (I was known as the girl, thus the inclusion of Radcliffe in the name of the club), my lecture was scheduled to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the group’s inception.

Yes, I am really that old. I don’t believe it, either.

Going back to see the long-term effects of what some friends of mine and I had wrought a couple of decades ago would have been strange enough, even if it hadn’t been — pardon my French — damned hard to set the club up in the first place.

But the fact is, the group’s rise from a handful of SF-loving geeks (admittedly, attractive, well-rounded ones, for the most part, but geeks nonetheless) fighting with the university to establish a club devoted to a book genre that the English department would not even consider touching with the proverbial ten-foot pole to a well-established, well-respected social club that sponsors, with the university’s fervent blessing, a full-scale convention and a magazine…

Well, that’s quite a trajectory for a scant 20 years, and mirrors SF/fantasy’s growing acceptance as literature in general.

It definitely reflects my extended family’s experience over the past 50 years. In the early 1950s, the literary productions of such writers as Philip K. Dick (my mother’s husband at the time) and Alex Apostolides (my mother’s big brother) were considered only marginally more respectable than pornography. (To underscore the irony of this, Uncle Alex was best known for a short story he co-wrote with Hugo Award winner Mark Clifton, “What Thin Partitions,” which appeared in The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1954, along with Richard Matheson’s “The Last Day.” Uncle Alex was also an editor at the Los Angeles Free Press, where for years he was listed on the masthead as Staff Shaman.)

Science fiction, in other words, was a pulp genre utterly dismissed by the literati, if and when they deigned to discuss it, as trash for the masses. The literary mainstream barely regarded it as having been written in English.

A view not entirely dissimilar to that expressed in the mid-1980s by the English professors we asked to be HRSFA’s faculty advisors, incidentally — and virtually identical to the response I received a few short years ago, when I mentioned to a well-respected author who regularly serves on major literary grant committees that I was writing a memoir about my relationship with arguably the most important science fiction writer of the 20th century.

“Science fiction?” the grand dame exclaimed, wrinkling up her august nose; if she’d had skirts to sweep aside, she would have. “Obviously, I never read it. Why would you waste your talent on that?”

Times, as they say, change. Ask the staff of any used bookstore that stocks American literature of the past fifty years, and they will tell you that there are two authors whose books they positively cannot keep on the shelves: Philip K. Dick and Charles Bukowski.

The latter of whom, incidentally, was a writer for the Los Angeles Free Press.

Last year, Philip was the first SF author to have his work published in the prestigious Library of America series, billed by the New York Times Book Review as the “quasi-official national canon” of American literature. And this year, I gave a lecture on his life and work in the classroom that had previously housed my favorite class as an undergraduate — a course taught, come to think of it, by a professor who refused my request to become HRSFA’s faculty advisor.

Wonders, in fact, never cease; if only Philip or Uncle Alex had lived to see it.

How did it feel to give that talk? As the Doge of Genoa allegedly told someone who asked him to name the greatest wonder he saw at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles — pardon my French again — “Ce qui m’étonne le plus ici, c’est de m’y voir.”

To paraphrase, nothing about it astonished me more than the fact that I, of all people, was there to see it. (Did I mention that the libraries at Harvard were pretty good?)

I marched into that lecture hall practically floating upon the otherworldly cheers of that hefty portion of the choir celestial composed entirely of late under-appreciated writers in every genre. I shared the podium with San Francisco State professor and blogger David Gill, who treated us to a trenchant analysis of Philip Dick’s rise to respectability, complete with pictures.

Or is it really respectability? Through a series of sometimes startling excerpts from reviews and articles, some of which were written in response to the release of Philip’s novel anthology by the Library of America, David demonstrated that much of the recent acclaim has been accompanied by some rather nasty back-handed slaps: in the same breath as they call Philip a genius, they call him a madman, a drug addict, a fruitcake.

All of those phrases are lifted from actual articles, by the way.

The audience oohed, ahed, and chuckled as David demonstrated the bifurcated past and current public image. They became rather quiet when I told them who I was — and that I had spent a significant portion of my childhood and adolescence not only seeing the many ways in which that public persona was not an accurate reflection of the man, but observing and even participating in Philip’s creative manipulation of the media to produce that wacky image.

I come by my storytelling credentials honestly, you see, having grown up helping make up stories for a famous man to tell credulous press. Because, after all, constructing fantasy is the family business.

I’d tell you all about it, but the last time I committed my life story to print, lawyers came storming after me. Sorry about that.

Suffice it to say, the audience did not seem to find my truthful account unconvincing. Which is — if I may be permitted to blow my own horn for a moment — saying something, because as Philip taught me, a really well-constructed fiction is not only more entertaining than the truth, usually, but generally more plausible.

Reality has all sorts of rough edges that a smart storyteller will smooth out.

During the question-and-answer period after my talk, a pretty young woman in the audience — who will, because the times they are a-changin’, receive a diploma marked Harvard in a year or two, rather than a hyphenate reflection upon her gender and a memorial to the generosity of Ann Radcliffe a couple of centuries ago — raised her hand to inform me that she had been assigned to read Philip’s work in a class.

As in recently. As in at Harvard. And the celestial choir of genre writers broke into triumphant song.

Just for a moment, leaning on the podium in front of that room full of science fiction and fantasy fans, including one of the very fans from the mid-1970s Philip — yes, and I — had worked so hard to keep entertained with wild pseudo-biography, I felt not only Philip’s vindication, and my mother’s, and Uncle Alex’s, but the hilarious satisfaction of Ann Radcliffe as well. She had a dream of seeing women at Harvard; I had a dream of seeing science fiction and fantasy treated with respect there.

Just because something impressive seems set in stone doesn’t mean that it actually is permanent. A barrier may be hard to move, but impossible? I don’t think so.

And that, in case you had been wondering, is why I never waver in my faith, exhibited here on a daily basis, that good writing will eventually make its way into the public eye. It may take decades of toil, tears, and plain dogged persistence, but it will. I’ve seen it; my family has seen it; Harvard has seen it.

Bet your bottom dollar on the Ann Radcliffes of this world, my friends. They, like the other wacky dreamers dismissed by the mainstream as disrupters of the status quo, tend to win in the end.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 4 Comments on Picking the right literary contest for you, part II, in which we discover, distressingly, that I STILL do not run the universe

Picking the right literary contest for you, part II, in which we discover, distressingly, that I STILL do not run the universe

Why do I have the nagging feeling that I was supposed to remind you all of something? It’s on the tip of my tongue…if only I had left myself some kind of subtle reminder…

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Ah, yes: in case you’ve been reading the blog with a blindfold on all week, I am going to be giving a talk onThe Multiple Myths of Philip K. Dick, this coming Saturday, January 26th, at Harvard.

To be specific, it will be at Vericon, the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association’s annual SF, fantasy, and gaming convention. Admission to an entire day’s events runs from $10 – $20, depending upon when you register, and kids under 14 get in free, so I hope to see many of you there.

Now where was I? Ah, yes.

Yesterday, I horrified the innocent Virginias of the world by pointing out that in the average literary contest, the impartiality emperor might, to put it delicately, be under-dressed. Today, I shall give you a few pointers on how to figure out which contests are most likely to serve you best.

You’re going to want to look for a reputable contest — one that is, at minimum, blindly judged. In a credible contest, entrants are asked to leave their names off the submission’s pages (i.e., no last name in the slug line, no name on the title page), so that there is no possibility of a contest judge’s looking an entry and saying, “Hey, I know him. I owe him a favor — I’m just going to slide it into the finalists’ pile unread.”

Last time, if you’ll recall, I brought up the possibility that not all contests are blindly judged — and in those that aren’t, it can be awfully hard for even the best writer who isn’t already known to the judges to make it to the finalists’ round.

Don’t LOOK at me like that, Virginia. The last time I checked, I did not run the universe, nor do I manage any of the many and varied contests out there for writers in the English language.

If I DID run either, contest entries would be free; every contest would provide each non-placing entrant with supportive and useful feedback; finalists would be given a tutorial on how to approach agents and editors before and after the winners were announced, and every time a writer finished writing a good paragraph, a sugar-free, fat-free, calorie-free chocolate cupcake with a cherry on top would appear on her desk, as a reward for virtue.

If you haven’t noticed any of these things happening lately, it’s fair to say that I still am not in charge of very much of the writing world.

Speaking of woebegone faces, I shall never forget the looks on the faces of everyone at the awards ceremony of a QUITE respectable Southern conference when the teenage daughter of two of the contest judges carried off the Young Writer award — and, as I recall, a not insignificant check, derived, no doubt, from the entry fees of hundreds of trusting high school students whose parents were not regularly having drinks with the judges.

Had Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Bob the Builder all been hauled out of the room by DEA agents for peddling narcotics to kids, the attending writers’ expressions could hardly have expressed more shocked disgust.

Now, to be fair, in that particular year, the winner’s parents had actually been judging in other categories, not their daughters, but since they had been her first readers and were rather chatty people, it would require a faith in human nature so childlike that it would border on the infantile to believe that the judges in her category would not have had SOME inkling which entry was hers.

I’m not saying that the contest was rigged, per se; I’m just saying that the teenaged winner’s mother won in the nonfiction category.

A good tip for avoiding this type of situation: enter contests sponsored by organizations, not cliques. The writers’ grapevine can really help you here. Ask other writers about particular contests before you spend time and money on entering them.

Poets & Writers magazine, which lists literary contest deadlines in each issue, does a pretty good job of screening, so if a contest seems a bit shady to you, check if it is listed there.

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

The next question you should ask yourself before mailing off your submission is: how good are your chances of winning?

Yes, any contest win or place will look nice on your writing résumé, but obviously, some contests are more prestigious than others. Less prestigious ones can actually be a better bet, if they are legitimate.

“Has not ruling the universe finally unhinged you?” I hear some of you exclaiming. “Isn’t bigger ALWAYS better?”

Not necessarily. You might be better off with a less well-known contest your first few times out.

For an exceedingly simple reason: your odds of making the finals are significantly higher in a small entry pool than a large one. Big-ticket contests attract stiff competition; contests with large cash prizes attract a higher percentage of professionals amongst the entrants.

Also, your chances of winning are higher if your writing resembles that of past winners. This is true for another exceedingly simple reason (they are abounding today, aren’t they?) — contest judges tend to be loyal folk, returning to the task with a tenacity a spawning salmon would envy. In most writers’ organizations that offer contests, the first round of reading is performed by volunteers.

And the same volunteers, year after year after year.

And, miraculously, their literary tastes don’t change all that much in the intervening twelve months between judging cycles. Go figure.

For the sake of example, let’s posit that the volunteers of a particular contest have historically favored Gothic romance. You, on the other hand, write futuristic fantasy, and there is only one category for novels. Think you’d be probably better off going for a different contest, one that favors your type of work?

If your answer was an unqualified, “By God, yes!” help yourself to a gold star out of petty cash. The more specialized your genre, the more it behooves you to check in advance whether a conference’s complement of judges tend to treat it with respect.

Or (to take a purely hypothetical case that couldn’t possibly refer to any contest run in my local area in which I might have taken a high prize in years past) if the top mainstream fiction category prizes in a prestigious competition are carried off year after year by literary fiction writers, you might want to think twice about entering fiction that is, say, particularly mainstream.

But if you happened to write on the literary side of romance, or are an unusually descriptive SF/fantasy writer, you might stand a good chance. Getting the hang of it?

How can a potential entrant tell what the judges’ preferences are, short of taking them all out to lunch individually and asking them? Most contests will list past winners on their websites, tucked away in a corner somewhere; check them out.

If the sponsoring organization publishes winning entries — and many have small magazines — read a few. If your writing style is radically different from what has won in the past, the contest is probably not for you.

In any contest with celebrity judges — i.e., famous writers who make the final selections from amongst the finalist pool — this goes double, or even triple. If your writing doesn’t resemble the famous judge’s in form, think twice before bothering to enter.

I can feel you wincing, Virginia. Crunching a few dry crackers should help with the nausea.
Even if you’re lucky enough to find a celebrity judge who is well-read outside of his own subgenre — and, even better, willing to reward work unlike his own — the bigwigs virtually never read all of the entries. Commonly, they read only the finalists’ submissions.

In practice, that means that those crusty volunteers I mentioned above screen the entries first — and all too frequently, edge out good entries that do not resemble the celebrity’s, on the well-intentioned theory that everyone’s writing tends to reflect his own reading tastes. They’re just trying to save the celebrity some time.

The two-tier system is followed in almost every literary contest, incidentally, celebrity-judged or not: the first rounds are evaluated by a different group of people than those who ultimately pick the winners. Sometimes, the judging criteria are not coordinated across rounds as well as one might hope.

Which is why, in case those of you who have heard contest judges grumbling in the bar after awards ceremonies, the entries that really wow ‘em in the early rounds often do not win or place. Usually, it is only within the power of a first-round judge to recommend that an entry make it to the finalist round; what happens there is generally under someone else’s control.

Why set it up this way? Well, since final-round judges are often chosen from amongst those agents and editors who are committed to attending the conference attached to the literary contest, it’s mostly intended to save the final-round judges reading time. But a two-tiered (or even three-tiered) system also makes it significantly harder to rig an outcome.

If it’s not clear why that might be desirable from an entrant’s point of view, you might want to re-read the anecdote at the beginning of this post.

If the contest is attached to a conference where the awards are given (and, as I mentioned above, many are), try to find out in advance whether the agents who typically attend that conference ones who might be interested in your work.

I can tell you from personal experience: while having a contest win, place, or show under your belt is great ECQLC (eye-catching query letter candy), being a finalist at most conferences confers a good deal more than just a nice ribbon attached to your name badge.

It marks you out as someone with whom, for instance, an agent might want to pause and have a hallway conversation, or ask, “So, what do you write?” during otherwise pitch-free social time in the bar. And that, as they say, is nothing at which you should be sneezing.

In other words, it’s a fabulous little conversation starter — and that could be a very good thing, if your dream agent happens to be in attendance, couldn’t it?

Here’s an idea: you might want to target contests attached to conferences that your dream agent habitually attends.

How can you find this valuable information? Well, I wish I had a clever tip to pass along, something nifty that would give my blog’s readers a competitive edge, but the fact is, the standard agency guides often list this information. (If you are unfamiliar with how agency guides work, please see the HOW TO READ AN AGENCY LISTING category at right.)

The internet is your friend here, too: pretty much every conference will list which agents they cajoled to it last year and/or those who will be blandished into being there this year.

As I said yesterday, there’s more to using contests to your benefit than sending in a well-written entry: there’s strategy. Next time, I shall turn this question on its head, talk about what you can get out of entering a writing contest.

Keep up the good work — and wish me luck in Boston!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Picking the right literary contest for you, or, about the Easter Bunny…

Picking the right literary contest for you, or, about the Easter Bunny…

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Know what this is, campers? It’s the building where, three days hence, I’m going to be giving my first-ever formal lecture on my memoir.

Yes, THAT memoir. The one that all the legal furor was about; the one that still hasn’t come out. Essentially, this will be a promotional appearance for a book that isn’t available for sale. Quixotic, no?

Admittedly, a fairly hefty percentage of the buildings at Harvard look like this, especially in the snow. So don’t walk into just any red brick building, should you be planning to attend. Check the Vericon schedule, to make sure that you don’t get lost amid all of the similar architecture. Hey, while you’re at it, why not pre-register and take advantage of the significant discount?

Okay, that’s enough self-promotion for today. Let’s unroll the Picket Fence of Integrity, to separate practice from theory:

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Literary contest season is practically upon us, so as I do every year, I’m going to revisit one of my favorite omnibus topics, what differentiates a contest entry that makes it to the finals from all the others. What criteria do contest judges tend to use, and how may a clever writer gear an entry to cater to them?

“But wait!” the neophyte entrant cries (after having skipped yesterday’s post, evidently), “Why should my entry be judged upon ANY criterion other than pure quality of writing? If not…“ and here, as you may well imagine, tears well up in the neophyte’s harp seal-like eyes, “how can we be sure that the best writing will always win?”

Um…the same way we know that the Tooth Fairy is indeed the one who filches all of those discarded teeth from under the pillows of the innocent? Or the reason that we’re convinced that the Rabbit of Springtime is responsible for chocolate eggs showing up on Easter morn?

If your first instinct upon reading that last paragraph was to say, “By Jove, yes! There are some things that I am simply willing to take on faith,” then I can only suggest that you avert your eyes from what I’m about to say next.

Only the cynical on board now? Good. As both a former contest winner and a veteran judge of literary contests, I am here to tell you: no, Virginia, winning a literary contest is virtually never just about the quality of the writing. It’s about the writing AND playing the contest game well. Of course, being lucky doesn’t hurt, either.

Which means — hold onto your hat here, Virginia, because this is a big one — that the best-written entry does not necessarily always win.

Heck, the best-written entry that meets all of the judging criteria doesn’t even necessarily win. But without a shadow of a doubt, even a brilliantly-written entry that does NOT meet those criteria, or that violates contest rules, will virtually never make it to the finals.

Which means, in practice, that a good two-thirds of the entries to the average contest never stood a chance. Not because those entries were poorly written, but because contest entrants have, as a group, a less-than-admirable tendency not to read rules and guidelines very closely.

Over and above technical violations, most entries are also docked points for such unromantic trespasses as incorrect formatting, misspellings, lack of a hook in the first line…and that’s before the aesthetic judgments are even under consideration.

Anyone out there care to guess why the nit-picks are generally tackled first?

I can already my long-term readers chanting the answer: for exactly the same reason that agencies are so eager to use technical criteria to reject submissions — time. Since the vast majority of entries are rife with technical errors, casting the technically flawed manuscripts out of finalist consideration is the single quickest way to thin the stacks of entries.

Sorry about that, Virginia. And when you’ve got a second, there’s something you ought to know about Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, unless you have had the foresight to have volunteered to serve as a contest judge in the years before you enter your first contest — not a bad idea, incidentally; contests are always seeking new judges, and it’s one of the least expensive crash courses in why most manuscripts get rejected you’ll ever find — it’s rather hard for the average entrant to learn what precisely the relevant criteria are.

As those of you who have been reading this blog for a while already know, I think the practice of keeping this kind of useful knowledge from aspiring writers is, well, let’s not say despicable; let’s call it counter-productive. I wish that more contests were up front about what kind of submission they would reward, and what they would condemn.

Why do I feel so strongly that you need to have this information at your fingertips? Because if you are going to invest the not inconsiderable time, effort, hope, and entry fee in trying to generate some EXQLC, call me zany, but I’d like to see you stand a good chance of winning.

That bizarre acronym stands for eye-catching query letter candy, in case you were wondering — and short of previous publications, winning, placing, or being named a finalist in a well-respected contest is some of the best EXQLC you can have. Agents pay attention to that kind of credential; it makes your query letters jump out of the daily pile.

Why? Well, most queriers list no writing credentials at all, either through lack of awareness that it would help make their query more effective or, more commonly, because they have no credentials to list. (If you’re one of the many who finds himself scratching his head, wondering what could possibly fill that gaping hole in the query letter, please see the HOW TO WRITE A QUERY LETTER category at right for a few tips.)

The cumulative result of this phenomenon: a query that lists publication credits and/or contest wins automatically looks substantially more professional than most. Even if those credits or wins are in wildly different genres than the book being pitched: agents like to be the SECOND person to recognize a writer’s talent, after all.

But how does an aspiring writer know which contests will make for the best EXQLC for the buck?

This is a very serious question: as anyone who has ever Googled “writing contest” is no doubt already aware, there are a LOT of contests out there. Most, unfortunately, do not offer cash prizes, but many do offer publication. (In fact, contests are a not uncommon way for literary magazines just starting up to rake in a whole lot of good writing for free.)

Almost all, however, charge an entry fee, sometimes a hefty one.

As I have mentioned before, there is now an entire industry devoted to offering help to aspiring writers, and like seminars and conferences and how-to books, what the contests offer writers who enter varies widely. So just as you should learn all you can about a writers’ conference before you slap down the registration fee, before you pay to enter a contest, it would behoove you to do a little bit of homework.

The first question you should ask: is the contest credible?

Unfortunately, the first place I would normally send you to find the answer to such a question, Preditors and Editors, is not going to be much help. Oh, it will tell you if a contest is a notorious rip-off, but as a matter of policy, P&E will not recommend any contest that charges any entry fee at all.

However, unless a contest is being run as a charity — which even most non-profit writers’ organizations cannot afford to do — or the administrative details are being handled by Santa while the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and the Great Pumpkin frantically read entries, I’m not quite sure how even the most well-meaning contest organizers could pull this off.

P&E’s disapproval of entry fees means, in practice, that the reputable contest that charges $15 to cover irreducible administrative costs (contests don’t run themselves, you know) ends up lumped in the same category as the aspiring group of friends who realized that they could rake in a whole lot of money if they threw up a website, announced a literary contest for book-length works (there aren’t many of them) at $80 a pop, and sat back to rake in the dough.

Ultimately, that the potential entrant will need to dig a little deeper to determine credibility.

To complicate matters further, it is no secret that there are many contests out there that solicit widely for entrants primarily as a fundraising effort, rather than a sincere attempt to discover heretofore unsung talent. In fact, the last few years have seen quite a bit of controversy in the writing community over how various literary contests are judged.

Specifically, not all feature blind judging, where the judges do not know whose entry is whose. And not all contests that claim to have blind judging actually do.

I know, Virginia, I know. Just hold that cold compress to your head, and the dizziness should subside soon.

Why should a prudent entrant worry about how a contest is judged? Because selective judging may favor certain entries, rendering it harder for a newcomer to break into the finalists’ circle. It is not unheard-of, for instance, for organizations to solicit entries from outside their memberships, but have an established track record of only awarding prizes to their own members.

Check the fine type of the contest rules, as well as the hometowns of the finalists and semifinalists of years past: if they cluster too much, wonder if the locals have an edge.

Nor is it at all unusual for contests ostensibly for the unpublished to allow published writers to submit their work-in-progress for judging alongside the work of the less experienced. A good tip: check last year’s winners’ list for the moderately well-known. if John McPhee has won their short story category any time since 1955, for instance they’re probably not too careful about keeping out those with hefty publishing credentials.

Not to mention the scandal a few years back when a major writers’ magazine happened to notice that the students of the writers who were judging contests seemed to be winning major awards on a fairly regular basis.

Ready for another shock, Virginia? After the scandal broke, absolutely nothing bad happened to the judges who were favoring their students in competition. Heck, some of them are still regularly judging contests. Obviously, this kind of pseudo-blind judging is grossly unfair to the other entrants, but the moral of this story is not that not all contests are squeaky-clean.

The moral: let the entrant beware.

Tomorrow, I shall give you some tips on how to go about bewaring. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 6 Comments on Let’s talk about this: what do you wish you had known before you entered your first contest?

Let’s talk about this: what do you wish you had known before you entered your first contest?

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Personal business first — hey, narcissism is the blogger’s privilege, right? — a quick update for those of you who were thinking (seriously, I hope) of coming to my talk this coming Saturday, January 26th, at Vericon, the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association’s annual SF convention. Admission to an entire day’s events runs from $10 – $20, depending upon when you register, and kids under 14 get in free, so I hope to see many of you there.

There will also be some pretty terrific SF, fantasy, YA, and graphic novel writers in attendance, including Orson Scott Card (the keynote speaker), M.T. Anderson, Cassandra Clare, Marie Brennan, Elizabeth Haydon, Jim Kelly, Kelly Link, Lois Lowry, Randall Munroe, Donna Jo Napoli, Sharyn November, and William Sleator. Most of them seem to e speaking/signing at several events (judging from the schedule, I don’t think you’ll be able to throw a piece of bread at the conference without hitting the aforementioned OSC), so your opportunities to ask probing questions about improving your craft should be vast. Actually, a quite good events geared for SF/fantasy writers appears to be happening during my talk — and if that’s not a recipe for convention richness, I should like to know what is.

If you’re in the area, why not stop on by? As incentive, let’s take another look at that stunning logo, shall we?

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Okay, that should be enough of a dragon fix for anyone for one day. Back to business.

As I have been hinting for the last few weeks, I am going to be launching tomorrow into a fairly hefty series on contest entry preparation. As an author who landed her agent partially as a result of having won a literary contest of some repute (with an early draft of the memoir about which I shall be lecturing on Saturday, as a matter of fact), I am, as my long-time readers already know, a tireless proponent for this brand of eye-catching query letter candy.

(That deserves an acronym of its own, doesn’t it? Now and forever after, it shall be known on this site as ECQLC; pronounce it if you dare.)

To that end, I concentrated fairly hard on a single contest’s requirements last year (and if you’re interested in entering the contest sponsored by the Organization-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, last year’s tips have been carefully preserved under the CONTEST ENTRY PREP category at right). In perhaps unrelated news, that contest’s entry pool evidently reached unprecedented proportions, thus creating greater competition for those who entered.

Great for the sponsoring organization, of course, but not necessarily a good thing for my readers who entered. Except, perhaps, for the one member of our little Author! Author! community who won, and the several others who placed and made finalist. (Toot, toot goes the horn.)

This year, I’m going to make every effort to be impartial about which contest’s rules I use for examples, to avoid even the appearance of favoring one over another. Since I know that not all of my readers are interested in entering contests, I shall also be gearing this year’s discussions of reliable contest judges’ pet peeves toward those that are also notorious agency screener pet peeves.

It’s going to be a pet peeve-a-thon! I can hardly wait.

To start us off on the right foot — and to get a better sense of what kinds of contests you’ve been considering entering — I’m going to turn the floor over to you for the day. Those of you who have entered contests in the past, what do you wish someone had told you before you entered for the first time?

For those of you who have not entered contests, but considered it: what are you looking for in a literary contest? What would you like winning it to do for you — and how difficult have you found it to track down a contest that offers those benefits?

And, as always: is there any aspect of contest entry that you find particularly puzzling, so I know to include discussion of it in posts to come?

To get the ball rolling, I’ll start: I wish that I had realized prior to my first contest entry how heavily the potential marketability of the book tends to weigh in the judging. Oh, I knew to check lists of past winners of broadly-defined categories in order to see if certain types of books had traditionally won. (In the contest where my memoir won, for instance, the nonfiction book winner has rarely been anything but a memoir, bad luck for writers of other NF books.) But it had not occurred to me before my first entry that contest judges might be using the same criteria as agencies. Or at any rate, what they believed to be the criteria used at agencies.

Instead, I had thought — possibly because the contests I was entering said as much on their promotional materials — that the only things that mattered were the beauty of the writing, how professionally it was presented, and how compelling the story was. The first time I received contest feedback that said, “Great story, well told — too bad that there isn’t a market for it,” I was crushed.

But I did learn from that experience: the next time I entered a contest, I sent not my best writing, but my most marketable idea. And I won. So I suppose I should be grateful to that curmudgeonly contest judge, in retrospect.

Your turn. As always, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The exclusivity dilemma, part III, or where strategy and ethics overlap

The exclusivity dilemma, part III, or where strategy and ethics overlap

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An impressionistic view of an agent’s office, where blue equals yet to be read.

Today is, thank goodness, my final post in this micro-series on how to juggle multiple submissions when one of the requesting agents has requested an exclusive. I know, I know: for most aspiring writers, this particular dilemma seems downright desirable — and perhaps not immediately applicable to one’s day-to-day querying life.

My timing on this series has not been entirely accidental, however: today marks the celebration (in the U.S., anyway) of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. While most of the population is hearing some rendition of the “I have a dream” speech (why does one so rarely hear the later, “poverty is economic violence” rhetoric, I wonder?), aspiring writers everywhere are rubbing their hard-worked hands together in anticipation.

Why? Because today marks the unofficial end of the annual avalanche of queries and submissions from New Year’s resolution-keeping writers. As my long-term readers know quite well, I always advise against querying or submitting during the high-stress first few weeks of the year.

Starting about now, though, incoming mail volumes at agencies return to normal, and our old pal Millicent the screener’s mood rises exponentially. Why not celebrate by sending her a query?

Because I truly hope that you will, now that the moratorium is over, I wanted you to be prepared just in case you do find yourself in Mehitabel’s dilemma. Hey, is it so far beyond belief that some of you might be intending to query exclusive-only agencies — or find yourself on the receiving end of a request to send materials from an agency that you did not realize had this policy?

Of course not. Let’s get back to work.

Mehitabel, for those of you who did not make her acquaintance yesterday, is a well-meaning aspiring writer who, wisely, kept right on querying even after a couple of agents (Jessica and Ryan, if you’re keeping score) asked to see partials. Imagine her surprise when one of these subsequent queries yielded a request for an exclusive from Quentin.

Obviously, it is empirically impossible to grant an exclusive peek at a manuscript already under consideration at other agencies. So what’s a girl to do?

Last time, I suggested that Mehitabel resolve her logical dilemma by contacting not Quentin to ask for his agency’s solo-look policy to be bent in her favor, but Jessica and Ryan, to inform them that another agent had asked to see the work exclusively. In nice, polite e-mails, she offered them three weeks in which to make up their minds before she submitted to Quentin, plenty of time for even extremely busy agents to read even a complete manuscript, much less 50 pages.

That way, she would either have an offer from Jessica, Ryan, or both — or she would be free to submit to Quentin on his terms.

Even before I finished typing this suggestion last time, I felt the ether bristle with a million doubts. For instance: hands up, everyone who felt distinctly uncomfortable allowing at least three weeks to pass before responding to a request for materials.

It is very common for those new to submission, particularly first-time pitchers at conferences to assume that requested materials MUST go out in the next mail, if not actually be overnighted or e-mailed, in order to reach the requesting agent before he forgets that he asked for them. But this isn’t necessary: even at a very busy conference, most agents will take notes on what they are requesting from whom.

Usually, the authorial assumption that speed is of the essence is not so much a direct response to anything the agent in question has actually said about the desirability of instantaneous submission, but rather a reflection of an underlying fear that the agent will change her mind, or at any rate forget all about the request for materials by the time it actually arrives.

But the fact is, unless an agent has actually asked a writer to rush a submission, she’s NOT expecting it to show up the next day, or even necessarily within the next week. It’s not as though she has nothing to do — or nothing to read — in the meantime, after all. Agencies are swamped, even when it’s not New Year’s resolution time.

So for those of you intrepid queriers who will be receiving submission requests in the weeks to come: there’s no need to panic. You’ve got time to do a little last-minute polishing.

When the good news arrives, remember to relax, take a few deep breaths — and read through your submission IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD before you pop it into the mail. (For a fuller explanation of why you should do this, and other tips on pulling together a submission packet when you are positively vibrating with excitement, please see the SUBMISSION PACKETS category at right.)

Remember, too, that you definitely don’t need to overnight your submission; it’s just not worth expending your hard-earned cash. The days are long past when a FedEx envelope would automatically be opened before one that came in the regular mail. Agency screeners figured that trick out long ago.

Pretty much all boxes marked REQUESTED MATERIALS tend to be opened at roughly the same rate. So mark it, send it regular mail, and call it good. Or, if you must rush, try Priority Mail, which takes 2-3 days within the continental U.S., but is scads cheaper than overnight mail.

You might want to spring for the package-tracking feature, so you have proof that your package did indeed arrive in one piece. Or add a stamped, self-addressed postcard for the agency screener to pop in the mail when the parcel arrives. Either will work beautifully.

As much as I am enjoying picturing your post-MLK day queries eliciting this response, I am digressing, I notice. Back to our previously-scheduled programming.

The other likely reason a writer might get tense at yesterday’s suggestion is that the notion of giving an agent a reading deadline, even a perfectly reasonable one, seems like a good way to alienate people. As in the kind of people who have the power to change your life by helping to get your book published.

As I mentioned yesterday, though, the vast majority of agents DO want to be told IMMEDIATELY if another agent is also reviewing a particular manuscript; hell hath no fury like an agent who learns after the fact that the writer whose manuscript she has not yet finished reading has already signed with someone else.

Why all the anger? Well, if she had known, the logic goes, she would have moved the submission up in her reading pile.

So mark this down as a rule of thumb: if any agent, exclusive-seeking or not, asks to see all or part of your manuscript while other agents are already looking at it, it would behoove you to contact each of them to pass along the information that there’s some competitive reading going on. That’s just basic courtesy.

If you are sending out several requested material packets simultaneously — say, after a barrage of pitching at a conference — go ahead and mention in your cover letter (you DO always include a cover letter with your submissions, right?) that other agents will be reviewing it, too.

No need to name names; the mere fact that others are looking at it will do. That in itself implies a deadline, so specifying the date upon which you will feel free to submit an exclusive is merely an extension of this little piece of politeness.

Fringe benefit to operating at this level of courtesy: reading rates tend to speed up remarkably once an agent knows that other eyes are perusing the same pages. (Yet another reason that Quentin might have asked Mehitabel for an exclusive; he may wish to take his own sweet time reading.)

“But Anne,” I hear some of you murmuring, “what if Jessica and Ryan don’t respond, and Quentin ends up saying no? Hasn’t Mehitabel burnt her bridges to the first two?”

Actually, no — at least, not if she had been polite in her letters to them AND not gone so far as to state outright that if they didn’t get back to her within the specified period, they shouldn’t bother to answer at all. (Yes, I HAVE seen writers do that, as a matter of fact. Generally ends in tears.) After Quentin has had a chance to consider the submission, or even after the agreed-upon period of exclusivity has ended (you weren’t planning on letting Quentin put Methitabel’s querying on hold indefinitely, were you?), she would be perfectly free to approach both Jessica and Ryan again, if they have not rejected her work. All she has done is responded with integrity to Quentin’s request for a time when she agrees not to sign with anyone else.

Which is precisely why, in case you were wondering, Mehitabel needs to set a time limit for Quentin’s exclusive, as I mentioned yesterday. Often, reputable agents will specify a length themselves, but if not, the writer should do it.

What she CANNOT do, however, is come back to Quentin two weeks into his exclusive and tell him that Jessica has offered to represent her. Well, I suppose she COULD do it, if she didn’t care about gaining a reputation for unreliability, but she could not reasonably expect him to continue considering her as a potential client.

Some of you are still not satisfied; I can feel it. “But Anne,” I hear you say, “this is all fine and dandy if Mehitabel receives the request for an exclusive after she’s submitted to others. But if she’s sending a big raft of queries out at the same time, she may well receive Quentin, Jessica, and Ryan’s requests for materials more or less simultaneously. What should she do then, huh? Put the other two on hold in order to humor Quentin’s request, or vice-versa?”

Ah, you must have heard of Mehitabel’s brother, Murgatroyd, who received three requests for submissions from precisely these agents within a single week. Since Quentin was the only one to place conditions on the submission, Murgatroyd was, like most new submitters, tempted to delay the other submissions in order to submit to him. But if Quentin takes a long time to get back to him, Murgatroyd risks the other requesters’ cooling off.

Unlike Mehitabel, Murgatroyd could ease his dilemma by taking one simple step — have you already guessed it?

In fact, let’s make an axiom out of it: never, under any circumstances, grant an open-ended exclusive. ALWAYS set a time limit on it — three weeks is perfectly reasonable — and let the requesting agent know that you intend to submit elsewhere after that.

Sound frighteningly daring? Actually, this kind of deadline-setting is rather common in the industry; people are busy. There’s no need to be confrontational about it, or even to double-check with the Quentins of this world that the deadline is okay: you merely need to state it in your cover letter. As in:

Thank you for your interest in my novel, HELL’S BELLES. I am pleased to give you an exclusive on it, as you requested. However, as other agents have asked to read it as well, I will have to limit the exclusive to three weeks.

See? Simple, direct, businesslike. Trust me, if Quentin wants longer, he will tell Murgatroyd so, but at least the latter will have been honest.

And after three weeks, whether he hears back from Quentin or not, Murgatroyd will be perfectly at liberty to submit to Jessica and Ryan. At which time, if Quentin is still vacillating (agents who ask for exclusives often take every bit as long to respond as those that do not), Murgatroyd should tell the other agents that another agent is looking at it, but he is no longer bound to exclusivity.

If he had not been clear at the outset and Quentin took a month or two to respond — far from uncommon — Murgatroyd would have gnawed his fingernails down to the elbow with worry, and still been no closer to landing an agent. By being clear about his own needs, rather than simply allowing three agents who do not know of one another’s existence to proceed as if each were the only one considering his work, Murgatroyd has both helped himself and avoided annoying any of them.

Enjoy your post-MLK querying binge, should you be indulging, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on The ethics of exclusives, or, the pros and cons of early admission

The ethics of exclusives, or, the pros and cons of early admission

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Yes, yes, I know: the tulip encroaches upon the useful information running down the right-hand side of the page. For one day, I think we can all live with that, can’t we? Besides, its enormity is very much in line with my feeling at the moment — isn’t it about time that spring came? (The photograph, incidentally, was taken by the ever-fabulous Marjon Floris.)

Why the longing for sun, light, warmth, color, and other things we tend to take for granted for half the year? Well, as some of you may have suspected when I didn’t post for a couple of days (and weekdays, too), I’ve been a bit under the weather again — or, to be specific, I have been inside, looking out at the weather, feeling like a school kid whose bright plastic rain boots have sprung a leak.

If I’m stuck inside, it seems to me that the least my yard could do is fast-forward a month or two to provide me with colorful scenery. Is that so unreasonable?

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I’m going through my list of often-asked questions, those excellent poke-in-the-ribs reminders that I should really write a blog post or two on certain murky issues. Today’s murk comes courtesy not of a question posted as a comment here, but rather as a culmination of something writer friends ask me privately a dozen or so times per year: what should a writer who already has submissions out to agents do if a newly-responding agent asks for an exclusive?

You didn’t think I had been procrastinating about the topics on the murk list because they were conducive to EASY answers, did you?

An exclusive, for those of you new to the term, is when a writer agrees to allow an agent a specific amount of time during which no other agent will be reviewing a manuscript. Generally speaking, agents will request exclusives for two reasons: either they fear that there will be significant competition over who will represent the project, or it is simply the agency’s policy not to compete with outside agencies.

Do I feel some of you out there getting tense, doing the math on just how many years (if not decades) it could take to make it through your list of dream agents if you had to submit to them one at a time? Relax, campers: requests for exclusives are actually fairly rare.

Why rare? Well, the first kind of exclusive request, the one Agent A might use to prevent Agents B-R from poaching your talents before A has had a chance to read your manuscript (hey, A’s desk is already chin-deep in paper), tends to be reserved for writers with more than just a good book to offer. Celebrity, for instance, or a major contest win.

Basically, the agent is hoping to snap up the hot new writer before anybody else does. Or before the HNW realizes that s/he might prefer to be able to choose amongst several offers of representation.

If you suddenly find yourself the winner of a well-respected literary contest or on the cover of People, remember this: just because an agent asks for an exclusive does not mean you are under any obligation to grant it. If your work is in demand, it’s not necessarily in your best interest to sign with the first agent who makes an offer — you will want the one with the best track record of selling books like yours, right?

Chant it with me now, long-time readers: you do not want to land just any agent; you want the best agent for YOUR work.

I mention this now, in advance of when at least some of you attain either celebrity or your first big literary prize, because when either of these things happen to a writer, it can be pretty disorienting.

Contest winners, after all, are often good writers who have spent years querying agents. (Partially because it’s considered a trifle gauche for the already-agented to enter contests for unpublished work.) The switch from frantically trying to catch an agent’s eye to multiple agents asking to see one’s winning entry, pronto, can often throw even the most level-headed writer for a loop.

Trust me, this is a problem you want to have: it’s a compliment to your work.

You will, however, want to think in advance about how you’re going to respond. Yes, I am speaking from experience here — and a big, well-deserved thank-you to all of my former contest-winner friends who had drilled me to say, no matter how shell-shocked I was after receiving the prize, “I’m sorry, but I’ve sworn that I won’t grant any exclusives. Would you like me to submit to you at the same time as I send out to the others?”

Granted, this glassy-eyed response did make a few agents grumble, but believe me, it was far, far better than my having to decide on the spot whether the first agent who asked to see my pages was so much more suited to my book than the other agents at the conference that I should not even let the rest take a peek at it.

Which is, incidentally, precisely what you are being asked to do with an exclusive. Think of it like applying for early admission to an Ivy League school: if the school of your dreams lets you in, you’re not going to want to apply to other universities, right? By applying early, you are saying that you will accept their offer of admission, and the school can add you to its roster of new students without having to worry that you’re going to go to another school instead.

It’s a win/win, in other words.

So if the best agent in the known universe for your type of writing asks for an exclusive, you might want to say yes. But if you have any doubt in your mind about whether Harvard really is a better school for your intended studies than Yale, Columbia, or Berkeley — to mix my metaphors again — you might want to apply to all of them at the same time, so you may decide between those that admit you.

My point is, if you are asked for an exclusive because your work is sought-after, it is up to you whether you would prefer to go steady right off the bat or date around a little. Got it? (If not, I can keep coming up with parallel cases all day, I assure you.)

With the other type of exclusive request, the one that emerges from an agency that only reviews manuscripts that no one else is, the writer is not offered that choice. Consequently, a request for an exclusive from these folks is not so much a compliment to one’s work (over and above the sheer desire to read some of it, that is) as a way of doing business.

In essence, these agencies are saying to writers, “Look, since you chose to query us, you must have already done your homework about what we represent — and believe us, we would not ask to see your manuscript if we didn’t represent that kind of writing. So we expect you to say yes right away if we make you an offer.”

Why might such a stance be advantageous for an agency to embrace? Well, it prevents them from ever having to experience the fear associated with the first type of exclusive request: if you send them pages, they may safely assume that you won’t be calling them in a week to say, “Um, Agent Q has just made me an offer, slowpoke. I still would like to consider your agency, so could you hurry up and finish reading my manuscript so you can give me an answer? As in by the end of the week?”

Okay, so you wouldn’t really be that rude. (PLEASE tell me you wouldn’t be that rude.) But let’s face it, agents who don’t require exclusive submissions do receive these types of calls a fair amount. And nobody, but nobody, reads faster than an agent who has just heard that the author of the manuscript that’s been propping up his wobbly coffee table is fielding multiple offers.

Agencies who demand exclusivity are, by definition, unlikely to find themselves in a similar Oh, my God, I have to read this 400-page novel by tomorrow! situation.

What does the writer get in return for agreeing not to submit to others for the time being? Not a heck of a lot, unless the agency in question is in fact the best place for his work.

But if one wants to submit to such an agency, one needs to follow its rules. Fortunately, agencies that maintain this requirement tend to be far from quiet about it. Their agents will trumpet the fact from the conference dais. Requires exclusive submissions or even will accept only exclusive queries will appear upon their websites, in their listings in standard agency guides, and on their form replies requesting your first 50 pages.

(Yes, Virginia, positive responses are often form-letters, too, even when they arrive in e-mail form. I sympathize with your shock.)

If they had company T-shirts, in short, there would probably be an asterisk after the agency’s name and a footnote on the back about not accepting simultaneous submissions. If they’re serious about the policy, they’re serious about it, and trying to shimmy around such a policy will only get a writer into trouble.

Do I feel some of you tensing up again? Relax — agencies with this requirement are not very common.

Why? Well, because they require their potential clients to bring their often protracted agent search to a screeching halt while the submission is under consideration, such agencies are, in the long run, more time-consuming for a writer to deal with than others. As a result, many ambitious aspiring writers, cautious about committing their time, will avoid querying agencies with this policy.

Which, again, is a matter of personal choice. Or it is if you happened to notice before you queried that the agency in question had this policy.

In my next post, I shall talk about what a writer who finds himself dealing with simultaneous requests from both exclusive-requesting and ordinary agents, but for today, let me leave you with something to ponder.

Requests for exclusives are, as I mentioned, rather rare. Writers who believe that ANY request for a submission is AUTOMATICALLY a request for an exclusive are not. As a result, would-be submitters sometimes delay sending out requested materials until they hear back from earlier requesters.

This is a serious strategic mistake. Unless an agent ASKS for an exclusive — and believe me, if an agency requires exclusivity, the member agent interested in your work will tell you so directly — it is NOT expected. In fact, now that the agent-finding market is so fierce, the vast majority of agents simply assume that good writers are querying and submitting widely.

Long-time readers, take out your hymnals: that apparently immortal conference-circuit rumor is simply not true — expectations of exclusivity are NOT the norm amongst agents. Nor is reticence about submission requirements.

A writer is under no obligation whatsoever to stop submitting or querying other agents while one is reading requested materials. So there.

Granting an unrequested exclusive is like applying to only one college per year: you might get in eventually, but it’s a far more efficient use of your time to apply to many simultaneously. Unless, of course, the school you’re absolutely sure that you want to attend offers you early admission.

Keep up the good work!

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Posted on - No Comments on Protecting your pages, part III: the straight and narrow path

Protecting your pages, part III: the straight and narrow path

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At last! A topic where I can justify using this fabulous photo! It was taken by the amazingly talented Marjon Floris, who also took the photo on my bio page.

More good news to report about a longtime blog reader: remember erstwhile guest blogger Thomas DeWolf, whose book, Inheriting the Trade, came out last week? Well, he must be a pretty riveting speaker, because an author reading and Q&A he did in Bristol, Rhode Island will be aired on Book TV (a.k.a. C-Span 2) this coming Saturday, January 19, at 1 PM Eastern time, and again on Sunday morning, January 20, at 1 AM Eastern.

Imagine that, eh? Let me tell you, seeing one of our own community, someone who not so long ago was pitching and querying, on Book TV…well, it nearly brings a tear to my eye. So congratulations again, Tom — and keep that good news rolling in, everybody!

For the past couple of days, I’ve been talking about reasonable precautions a writer can take to protect her work upon sending it out, rather than simply trusting that no one to whom she has e-mailed it will forward it to someone unscrupulous. Or, for that matter, that no ambitious Millicent will pounce upon it, carry it off, and present it to agent and editor alike as the product of her own fevered brain.

We writers tend not to talk about this much amongst ourselves, but if you think about it for a moment, we spend our lives sending our most intimate productions to total strangers: agents, editors, contest judges, not to mention Millicent the agency screener and post office employees from here to Madison Square Garden. We all know that querying and submitting our work requires great personal courage — take a moment to pat yourself on the back for that, please — but it also requires quite a bit of trust.

As I suggested yesterday, giving trust too easily — say, to a fly-by-night agency that earns its bread and butter by charging reading fees of writers, rather than by selling their books — can sometimes prove costly for those new to the biz. Last time, I sang the praises of doing some basic background checking before sending any stranger — be it soi-disant agent, possibly credible publisher, contest organizer, or even that nice fellow you met last week on a perfectly respectable forum — your manuscript.

Please tell me, after all that, that I don’t need to add: even if the recipient is your twin sibling who rescued you from a burning building at risk to his own life, never send your ONLY copy of anything you have written.

Yes, yes, I know that sounds self-evident, but believe it or not, that used to be the FIRST piece of advice the pros gave to new writers back in the days of typewriters. That, and to keep a pad of paper and a writing implement with you at all hours of the day or night, just in case inspiration strikes.

Why night as well, you ask? Because as experienced writers know, no matter how certain you are that you will remember that great idea that woke you up at 3:42 AM, if you don’t write it down, chances are very high that it will disappear into the ether like the mythical final stanzas of KUBLA KHAN.

You can also protect yourself by avoiding sending ANY of your original material by e-mail, at least to people you don’t know awfully well. Ideally, literally every piece of your writing that you ever send to anyone in the publishing industry with whom you do not already share an established relationship of trust should be sent via tracked regular mail.

If you can afford it, go ahead and spring for the return receipt postal option, so someone will actually have to sign for package. This is an especially good idea if the recipient is someone with whom you’ve never dealt before. That way, should it ever be necessary (pray that it won’t), you will be able to prove that you did indeed send it — and precisely when he received it, the rogue.

Why is being able to prove when he received it as important as if? Because, as I mentioned a couple of days ago, if a question ever arises about who wrote the book, you will be very, very happy that you can produce objective evidence of the first time your would-be plagiarist clapped covetous eyes (and grimy hands) upon your precious pages.

Actually, proving who wrote what when is substantially easier in the age of the computer than it was in either the bygone era of the typewriter or the long-lingering epoch of the bare hand. As clever reader Adam commented the other day, word processing programs do keep track of when particular files are created and modified, so chances are that you already have a historical record of when you began writing your opus, as well as your practice of updating it.

Unless, of course, your computer happened to melt down, get stolen, perish in a monsoon, or fall prey to some other mishap since you started writing. Yet another good reason to make back-ups frequently, eh?

(Oh, come on — did you honestly think I wouldn’t follow up after yesterday’s plea to save your materials early and often?)

Even with computer in perfect health and a closet full of back-up disks, however, you’re still going to want to exercise some care in how you bandy your manuscript around. From a writer’s point of view, it’s a far, far better thing NOT to be placed in the position of having to prove when you wrote a piece.

Sticking to paper submissions — and keeping impeccable records of who has them — minimizes the possibility of your work’s being waylaid.

Do I feel some waves of panic wafting in my general direction? “But Anne,” I hear some of you inveterate e-mailers protest, “what if an agent ASKS me to e-mail all or part of my manuscript? I can hardly say no, can I?”

Well, actually, you can, if you want: in my experience, nothing brings an e-mailed submission-loving agent or editor more quickly to a recognition of the joys of the printed page than a writer’s saying, “Gee, I would love to shoot that right off to you, but I think my computer has a virus. I wouldn’t want to pass it along to you. Just this time, I’m going to have to send you a paper copy, if that’s okay.”

Care to guess just how often a reputable agent or editor will say no after hearing THAT sterling little piece of argumentation? You’re the white knight here; you’re trying to protect the world from computer viruses. You’re not uncooperative — you should be up for membership in the Justice League, along with Wonder Woman and Superman.

Ah, I can hear that some of you still aren’t satisfied by promotion to superhero(ine). “But what if the agent insists?” you demand. “Or just has a really, really strong preference?”

Well, since you asked so nicely, and since truth compels me to admit that my own agent has been known to exhibit this preference from time to time, I’ll tell you. If you absolutely MUST send a submission via e-mail, again, double-check that the agency and/or publishing house toward which you are flinging it trustingly has a track record of being on the up-and-up.

Then, before you send it, e-mail a copy to yourself, just for your records. Or print up a copy, seal it in an envelope, sign across the seal (to make it obvious if it gets opened), and mail it to yourself. Once it arrives back on your doorstep, don’t open it; just hide it away in case you need it on some dark future day.

That way, you can prove, if necessary, that as of a particular date, you were the writer in the position to send the material.

If you choose to e-mail, too, it’s also not a bad idea to send blind copies to a couple of friends whom you trust not to forward it along. Ask them to save it until you send them an all-clear signal or until your name appears prominently on the New York Times Bestseller List, whichever comes first.

As long-term readers of this blog already know, I frown upon sending original material via e-mail, anyway, for a variety of practical reasons that have nothing to do with the possibility of a manuscript’s going astray. For a full banquet of my many tirades on the subject, I refer you to the E-MAILED SUBMISSIONS category at right. For our purposes today, however, I’m just going to treat you to a brief recap of the highlights, by way of review.

First, many, many NYC agencies and publishing houses are working on computers with outdated operating systems and not the most up-to-date versions of Word — and virtually all of them are working on PCs. So the chances that they will be able to open your attachment at all, especially if you are a Mac user, are somewhere in the 50-50 range.

Second, it’s significantly harder to read on a computer screen than on a printed page — and, unfortunately for acceptance rates, it’s also far quicker to delete a file than to stuff a manuscript into the nearest SASE. I leave you to speculate the probable effects of these undeniable facts upon speed with which the average e-mailed submission is rejected.

Third — and if you’ve been following this series, you should be murmuring this in your sleep by now — you can never really be sure where an e-mailed document will end up. It can be forwarded at the recipient’s discretion, and at the discretion of anyone to whom he forwards it, indefinitely.

Technically, this could lead to copyright problems, since part of the argument you would need to make if someone else claims to have written your book is that you made a reasonable effort to maintain control over how and where it could be read. Forwarding it as an attachment to anyone who asks does not, alas, convey the impression that you as the author are particularly insistent upon protecting your rights to the work.

The longer it’s been floating around, the harder it would be to try to rein it in again. Think about it: if your piece has been floating around the computers of Outer Mongolia for the last six months, how are you going to prove that you held control over who did and did not read your work? (Although, again, I’m not a lawyer, so if you find yourself in this position, hie ye hence and find an attorney who specializes in this branch of the law.)

This is an instance were a bit of foresight can really save your bacon — and the primary reason that, very sensibly, the screenwriters’ guild simply advises its members to register every draft of their screenplays with the guild before the ink dries from the printer.

Most other writers, however, do not enjoy the luxury of this kind of institutional protection, so we need to help ourselves. If you are a U.S.-based writer, you might want to consider just going ahead and registering the copyright for your work before you begin sharing it.

Stop groaning. It’s a lot less onerous — and significantly less expensive — than most aspiring writers tend to assume. Go ahead, take a wild guess about how much time it will actually take away from your writing to gain this protection and how spendy it is.

Well, the last time I did it, it took only the time required to print up a copy of my manuscript and fill out a one-page form. And the expense was unbelievable: a $45 registration fee and the expense of having my corner copy shop spiral-bind the thing.

That’s it. Honest. (And yes, nonfiction writers, you CAN register a book proposal. Jointly, even, if you have a collaborator.)

Okay, pop quiz, to make sure that you’ve been paying attention throughout this series: why, given its relative inexpensiveness, might a writer protective of his work not necessarily want to rush right out and register the copyright for it?

If your murmured response contained any reference whasoever to subsequent drafts, give yourself a great big lollipop. Since — chant it with me now — you can’t copyright a premise, storyline, or argument, but only the presentation of it, to be absolutely certain, you would actually need to register afresh after each new revision.

For a nit-picker like me, that could get darned costly.

This, in case you were wondering, is why writers used to resort to a protective practice of former days, what used to be called the poor man’s copyright. It is dirt-cheap and while it is not legally a substitute for actual copyright registration, it does have a pretty good track record for standing up as proof that the original author wrote a particular set of phrases prior to a particular date.

Here’s how to do a poor man’s copyright — and stop me when it starts to sound familiar. Print up a full copy of your manuscript; if it is too long to fit comfortably in a standard Manila folder, break it up into chapters and mail them in chunks. Place it (or the chapter) into a Manila folder. Seal the folder, then sign across the seal, the way professors do with letters of recommendation. This will make it quite apparent if the seal is broken. Then, take clear adhesive tape and place it over your signature and the seal. Address the envelope to yourself, then mail it.

When it arrives, DO NOT OPEN IT; store it in a safe place. Should you ever need to prove that you had written a work before someone else did, the postmark and the unbroken seal (let the judge be the one to open it) will help back up your contention that you had indeed written those pages long before that freeloader began passing them off as his own.

Repeat for every significantly revised draft, because — here we go again — it is the PRESENTATION of the concept that you can claim as your own, not the story itself. There’s no need to go crazy and mail yourself a new version every time you change a comma, but if you are pursuing this method of self-protection, a complete revision definitely deserves a new mailing.

Let me repeat, lest any over-literal person out there derive the incorrect impression that just because both phrases contain the word copyright, they must mean the same thing: poor man’s copyright does NOT provide the same legal protection as registering the copyright for a work. Poor man’s copyright is EVIDENCE that may be used to support a copyright claim, not a protection that will necessarily free you from worry forever and ever, amen.

However, as the right belongs to the author as soon as the work is written, not as soon as the copyright is registered, both practices are strengthening an already-existing claim to own the manuscript in question. And since it’s a whole lot cheaper to mail revised chapters to yourself (at least if you happen to have a spare closet big enough to hold all of those unopened envelopes), many writers have historically preferred it.

What you do NOT need to do – and what many novice writers give themselves away by doing — is place in the header or footer of every page, © 2008 Author’s Name. Yes, copyright can be established by proving intent to publish, but intent to publish is also established by submitting work to an agent or editor. Contrary to what you may have heard, the copyright bug will not protect you, should push come to shove.

It will, however, give rise to substantial mirth amongst its first readers at most agencies and publishing houses. “Look,” they will say, pointing, “here’s another rookie.”

This unseemly mirth tends to cover an undercurrent of hostility: writers who so pointedly indicate distrust of the people to whom they send their work, the logic goes, are in fact conveying a subtle insult. You are not to be trusted, such marks say, loud and clear, affronting those who would never steal so much as a modifier from an author and not scaring those who would steal entire books outright. Best to leave it out.

The beauty of the poor man’s copyright, of course, is that it can be done entirely without the knowledge of your recipients. Ditto with the blind e-mail copies. There’s no need to advertise that you are protecting yourself.

But for heaven’s sake, especially if you are dealing with someone that you do not know well enough to trust, take these few quiet steps to help yourself sleep better at night. Chances are, you will never need their help, but remember that old-fashioned sampler: better safe than sorry.

And call me zany, but I would prefer to see you get credit for your writing than the friend of the friend of the friend to whom you happened to forward it. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Protecting your pages, part II: dude, where is my manuscript?

Protecting your pages, part II: dude, where is my manuscript?

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Before I launch into today’s post, allow me to snap back into that periodic nagging mode that assails me every time I hear from a good writer experiencing a computer meltdown: when was the last time you backed up your hard disk — or, more importantly for our purposes, your writing files?

If it wasn’t either today or yesterday, may I cajole you into doing it soon — say, now-ish? If I ask really nicely? Because, really, picturing the anguish of one author of a possibly fried book in a day is all I can manage in my current weakened state.

Not that I’d try to guilt you into it or anything. But while you’re thinking about it, why not do it this very instant? I’ll still be here when you get back, languishing on my chaise longue.

(If you’re new to backing up your work, the BACK-UP COPIES category at right may prove helpful. I just mention.)

Back to the topic at hand. Yesterday, I broached the always-hot subject of protecting one’s writing from poachers. Once again, I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, so if you are looking for actual legal guidance on a specific copyright-related matter, you’d be well advised to get advice from one who specializes in giving legal advice to such legal advice-seekers.

Everyone got that?

We can, however, go over some general principles here. To see how well I made my points yesterday, here’s a little quiz:

Llewellyn has written a tender novel with the following plot: boy meets girl; boy loses girl over a silly misunderstanding that could easily have been cleared up within five pages had either party deigned to ask the other a basic question or two (along the lines of Is that your sister or your wife?); boy learns important life lesson that enables him to become a better man; boy and girl are reunited.

At what point should Llewellyn be begin running, not walking, toward an attorney conversant with copyright law with an eye to enforcing his trampled-upon rights?

(a) When he notices that a book with a similar plot line has just been published?

(b) When he notices that a hefty proportion of the romantic comedy films made within the last hundred years have a similar plot line?

(c) When a fellow member of his writing group lands an agent for a book with a similar plot line?

(d) When he picks up a book with somebody else’s name on the cover and discovers more than 50 consecutive words have apparently been lifted verbatim from a Llewellyn designer original?

If you said (d), clap yourself heartily upon the back. (I know it’s tough to do while simultaneously reading this and making a back-up of your writing files, but then, you’re a very talented person.) Anything beyond 50 consecutive words — or less, if it’s not properly attributed — is not fair use. Then, we’re into plagiarism territory.

If you said (c), you’re in pretty good company: at that point, most writers would tell Llewellyn that he should be keeping a sharp eye upon that other writer. It would be prudent, perhaps, to take a long, hard look at the other writer’s book — which, as they’re in the same critique group, shouldn’t be all that hard to pull off.

But sprinting toward Lawyers for the Arts? No. Plot lifting is not the same thing as writing theft.

Why? Everyone who read yesterday’s post, chant it with me now, if you can spare time from making that backup: because you can’t copyright an idea for a book; you can only copyright the presentation of it.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few small steps that Llewellyn might take to protect himself.

As I mentioned yesterday, the single best thing you can do to protect yourself is to deal with reputable agents, editors, and publishing houses. The problem is, you can’t always tell. The Internet, while considerably easing the process of finding agents and small publishers hungry for new work, also renders it hard to tell who is on the up-and-up.

I hope I’m not shocking anyone when I point out that a charlatan’s website can look just like Honest Abe’s — and that’s more of a problem with the publishing industry than in many others.

Why? Well, new agencies and small publishing houses pop up every day, often for very good reasons — when older publishing houses break up or are bought out, for instance, editors often make the switch to agency, and successful agents and editors both sometimes set up shop for themselves.

But since you don’t need a specialized degree to become an agent or start a publishing house, there are also plenty of folks out there who just hang up shingles. Or, more commonly, websites.

Which is one reason that, as those of you who survived last summer’s Book Marketing 101 series will recall, I am a BIG advocate of gathering information about ANY prospective agency or publishing house from more than one source.

Especially if the source in question is the agency’s website — and if the agency in question is not listed in one of the standard agency guides.

“Wha–?” I hear some of you cry.

Listing in those guides is not, after all, automatic, and like everything else in publishing, the information in those guides is not gathered mere seconds before the book goes to presses. The result: agencies can go in or out of business so swiftly that there isn’t time for the changes to get listed in the standard guides.

That’s problematic for aspiring writers, frequently, because start-ups are often the ones most accepting of previously unpublished writers’ work. But because it is in your interests to know precisely who is going to be on the receiving end of your submission — PARTICULARLY if you are planning to submit via e-mail — you honestly do need to do some homework on these people.

Happily, as I mentioned yesterday, there are now quite a few sources online for double-checking the credibility of professionals to whom you are considering sending your manuscript. Reputable agents don’t like disreputable ones any more than writers do, so a good place to begin verifying an agent or agency’s credibility is their professional organization in the country where the agency is ostensibly located. For the English-speaking world:

In the United States, contact the Association of Authors’ Representatives

In the United Kingdom, contact the Association of Authors’ Agents.

In Australia, contact the Australian Literary Agents Association.

I couldn’t find a specific association for Canada (if anyone knows of one, please let me know, and I’ll update this), but the Association of Canadian Publishers does include information about literary agencies north of the border.

Not all agents are members of these organizations, but if there have been complaints from writers in the past, these groups should be able to tell you. It’s also worth checking on Preditors and Editors or the Absolute Write Water Cooler, excellent places to check who is doing what to folks like us these days.

These are also pretty good places to learn about agents’ specialties, on the off chance that you might be looking for someone to query after the Great New Year’s Resolution Plague of 2008 recedes in a week or two.

Again, I just mention. And have you done that backup yet?

As with any business transaction on the Internet (or indeed, with anyone you’ve never heard of before), it also pays to take things slowly — and with a massive grain of salt. An agency or publishing house should be able to tell potential authors what specific books it has handled, for instance. (In the U.S., book sales are a matter of public record, so there is no conceivable reason to preserve secrecy.)

Also, even if an agency is brand-new, you should be able to find out where its agents have worked before — in fact, a reputable new agency is generally only too happy to provide that information, to demonstrate its own good connections.

Also, reputable agencies make their money by selling their clients’ books, not by charging them fees. If any agent ever asks you for a reading fee, an editing fee, or insists that you need to pay a particular editing company for an evaluation of your work, instantly contact the relevant country’s agents’ association. (For examples of what can happen to writers who don’t double-check, please see the FEE-CHARGING AGENTS category at right.)

Actually, anyone asking a writer for cash up front in exchange for considering representation or publication is more than a bit suspect. Unless a publisher bills itself up front as a subsidy press (which asks the authors of the books it accepts to bear some of the costs of publication) or you are planning to self-publish, there’s no reason for money to be discussed at all until they’ve asked to buy your work, right?

And even then, the money should be flowing toward the author, not away from her.

With publishing houses, too, be suspicious if you’re told that you MUST use a particular outside editing service or pay for some other kind of professional evaluation. As those of you who have been submitting for a while already know, reputable agents and editors like to make up their own minds about what to represent or publish; they’re highly unlikely to refer that choice out of house.

Generally speaking — to sound like your mother for a moment — if an agency or publisher sounds like too good a deal to be true, chances are that it is. There are, alas, plenty of unscrupulous folks out there ready to take unsuspecting writers’ money, and while many agencies and publishers do in fact maintain websites, this is still a paper-based industry, for the most part.

In other words, it is not, by and large, devoted to the proposition that an aspiring author should be able to Google literary agent and come up with the ideal fit right off the bat.

Do I hear some more doubtful muttering out there? “But Anne,” I hear many voices cry, “I certainly do not want to be bilked by a faux agency or publishing house. However, you’re not talking about such disreputable sorts potentially walking off with my submission. Weren’t we talking about protecting our writing, not our pocketbooks?”

Well caught, disembodied voices — and that’s part of my point. The fact is, if an unscrupulous agent or editor were seriously interested in defrauding aspiring writers, stealing manuscripts would not be the most efficient way to go about it. Historically, direct extraction of cash from the writer’s pocket has been the preferred method.

But that doesn’t mean that a smart writer shouldn’t take reasonable steps to protect both her pocketbook AND her manuscript.

Next time, I shall delve into manuscript protection itself, I promise. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Protecting your pages, or, is it being paranoid if someone actually is out to get you?

Protecting your pages, or, is it being paranoid if someone actually is out to get you?

Was that giant cry of “YES!” I just heard those of you who have been worrying about exchanging pages’ response to this post’s title? I expect so, because I have literally never taught a writing class or attended a writers’ conference where someone did not bring it up.

Clearly, some folks out there are worried about having their writing lifted by miscreants.

I had planned, as is my wont this time of year, to start a new series today on the ins and outs of contest entry prep, expanded to include some self-editing tips designed to reduce common manuscript micro-problems that tend to make contest judge and agency screener twitch a bit. But then I noticed that this particular issue has been cropping up on my running to-blog-upon list with more than usual frequency over the last year. Both intrepid commenter Chris and insightful reader Adam of Albion have asked me rather pointed questions on the issue in the comment sections of posts, which made me realize two important things about this blog: the comments are not searchable by the general public (I know not why), and I haven’t done an entire post on these concerns since late 2005.

Since I’ve just wrapped up a series encouraging you to give your unpublished manuscripts to other people, this seemed like a dandy moment to correct the latter. In fact, I’m going to be spending the next few days hitting topics on that patient to-blog-upon list.

One vital disclaimer before I begin: I am NOT an attorney, much less one who specializes in intellectual property law. So it would be a GRAVE MISTAKE to take what I say here as the only word on the subject, or indeed to come to me if you believe that your writing has been stolen. (And if you did, I would send you straight to my lawyer, so why not skip a step?)

However, I’ve noticed that most of the time, writers curious about this seem to be asking questions not because they fear that their intellectual property has been lifted or that they’ve violated someone else’s rights, but because they’ve heard vague rumors to the effect that every so often, an unpublished writer’s work has gotten stolen. And those pervasive rumors I can legitimately address.

To set your minds at ease: yes, writing does occasionally get stolen — but it’s exceedingly rare, and it usually doesn’t happen in the way that most hearers of the rumor fear.

Let me introduce Sharon, a writer who approached me a few years ago. I had the impression that she hadn’t been writing very long, but I wasn’t positive, as she was someone I barely knew — the on-again, off-again girlfriend of the brother of a friend of mine, which is as fine a definition of a casual acquaintance as I’ve ever heard. And yet she called me one day, full of questions.

Sharon had written a short piece — an essay, really — that she thought was marketable and had, through sheer persistence and the rare strategy of actually LISTENING to the advice she had been given by published writers of her acquaintance, gotten the publisher of a small press to agree to take a preliminary look at it. In mid-celebration for this quite significant achievement, she experienced a qualm: what if this guy stole her ideas, or her entire work?

Once the idea had taken hold in her brain, being a writer, she naturally embellished upon it in the dead of night: if it came down to the publisher’s word against hers, who would believe {her}? And how could she ever prove that she had come up with the idea first?

When she shared her fears, however, half of her friends laughed at her, saying that she was being paranoid and unreasonable. The other half told her, in all seriousness, that she should go ahead and register the copyright for what she had written before she e-mailed it to the guy. Or at the very least, they advised, she should tart up her pages by adding the copyright symbol (©) on each and every one. Whereupon the first set of friends laughed even harder and told her that nothing looks more unprofessional to folks in the publishing industry than the liberal application of that pesky ©.

Understandably confused, she did something very sensible: she called me and asked what to do. As Gore Vidal is fond of saying, there is no earthly problem that could not be solved if only everyone would do exactly as I advise. I trust all of you will cling to that inspiring little axiom until your dying breath.

The problem was, each set of Sharon’s friends was partially right: the vast majority of reputable publishing houses would never dream of stealing your material, and yet, as in any other business, there are always a few cads. At most writers’ conferences, you will hear speakers scoff at the possibility, but anyone who has been in the writing and editing biz for any length of time knows at least one good writer with a horror story.

Better safe than sorry, as our great-grandmothers used to stitch painstakingly onto samplers. (Actually, my great-grandmother was an opera diva who apparently regarded needlework as a serious waste of the time she could be spending being flamboyant, but I’m quite positive that other people’s great-grandmothers embroidered such things.)

In the United States, though, outright theft of a book, or even an essay or short story, is quite rare. To wave the flag for a moment, we have the strongest copyright laws in the world, and what’s more, a writer on our turf AUTOMATICALLY owns the copyright to his own work as soon as he produces it. So when people talk about copyrighting a book, they’re generally not talking about obtaining the right in the first place, but rather registering it with the U.S. Copyright Office.

So the friends who advised Sharon not to mar her footer with © 2008 Sharon were partially correct. In fact, they were passing along the prevailing wisdom: presenters at your garden-variety writers’ conference often tell aspiring writers not to use the © bug on their manuscripts when they submit them; it’s redundant.

How so? Well, everyone in the publishing industry is already aware that the author owns the copyright to her own writing. If she didn’t, they wouldn’t have to sign a contract with her in order to publish it, right?

In theory, then, writers are protected from pretty much the instant that their fingers hit the keyboard. So was Sharon’s other set of advisors merely ill-informed?

Unfortunately, no: in practice, a couple of problems can arise. Rights, as Thomas Hobbes informed us so long ago, are the ability to enforce them.

In the first place, owning the rights to what you write inherently and proving that you are the original author are two different things. Occasionally, some enterprising soul will latch on to another writer’s unpublished work and claim that he wrote it first, or co-writers will squabble over who gets custody of already-written work in a partnership break-up.

The result in either case, the usual result is an unseemly struggle to determine who coughed up any given page of text first.

Second — and you might want to be sitting down for this one, as it comes as rather a shock to a lot of writers — you can’t copyright an idea; you can merely copyright the PRESENTATION of it. Which means, in practice, that it is not possible to claim ownership of your storyline, but only how you chose to write it.

Aren’t you glad I told you to sit down first?

Learning about this second condition tends to obviate a good 85% of the concerns aspiring writers express about having their work stolen. Most of the time, writers are worried that someone will steal their STORIES, not the actual writing. There’s not a heck of a lot a writer can do about that, unfortunately.

But by the same token, unless the lifted plotline becomes a major bestseller, there’s really no reason that you shouldn’t push ahead with your version. Fiction is virtually never sold on the storyline alone, anyway; plotlines and NF arguments are almost never 100% unique.

As no one knows better than a writer, however, presentation — particularly GOOD presentation — generally IS unique. As industry insiders are so fond of telling writers, it all depends upon the writing.

This is why, as some of you inveterate conference-goers may have noticed, when agents, editors, and published writers are presented with a question about book theft, they tend to respond as though the question itself were a sign of an over-large ego in the asker. Just how revolutionary would an aspiring writer’s style have to be, the logic goes, for an agent or editor to WANT to steal it?

Which perhaps leaves the wondering writer reluctant to submit his long thought-out plotline and terrific premise to a publisher, lest it be handed to a better-known writer, but doesn’t really address his concern. Once again, we have a failure to communicate.

Do I see some hands in the air out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you protesting, and rightly so, “between the time I submit a manuscript to an agency and the time a book is published and thus equipped with a nice, clear copyright page stating precisely who owns the writing between those covers, it passes through quite a few hands. I may not even know who will end up reading it. Shouldn’t I worry about some of them deciding to make off with my actual pages and passing them off as their own?”

Having some doubts about Millicent’s integrity, are we? Well, it’s a reasonable enough concern: some of those hands will inevitably belong to people you do not know very well. Agency screeners like Millicent, for instance. Agents. Editorial assistants. Editors. Mail room clerks. The people in the publishing house’s marketing department.

And anyone to whom you give your manuscript as a first reader. Guess which paragraph contains the most likely thief of prose?

If you said the latter, give yourself a big, fat gold star for the day; I’ll be discussing casual exchanges in tomorrow’s post. But let’s think for a moment about why manuscripts sent to agencies and publishing houses very, very rarely turn up with anyone other than the author’s name on the title page.

An exceedingly straightforward reason springs to mind: agencies and publishing houses make their livings by selling work by writers. In-house theft wouldn’t have to happen awfully often before writers would stop sending submissions, right? So sheer self-interest would tend to discourage it.

But I’m not going to lie to you: at a less-than-reputable house or agency, it could happen.

The single best thing you can do to protect yourself is to deal with reputable agents, editors, and publishing houses. Not every organization with the wherewithal to throw up a website is equally credible. Actually, it’s not a bad idea to check anyone in the industry with whom you’re planning to do business on Preditors and Editors (link at right); if you have doubts about an individual agent, agency, or publishing house, check agents out with the AAR (Association of Authors’ Representatives). These are also good places to report any professional conduct that seems questionable to you; P&E is especially good about following up on writers’ complaints.

I always advise doing a basic credibility check before sending ANY part of your manuscript via e-mail. As I’ve mentioned several times before here, after you send out an e-mailed attachment (or any e-mail, for that matter), you have absolutely NO way of controlling, or even knowing, where it will end up.

Think about it: part of the charm of electronic communication is ease of forwarding, right? Yet another reason that I’m not crazy about e-mailed submissions.

While it’s highly unlikely that the chapter you e-mail to an agent — or that person you just met on an Internet chat room — will end up on a printing press in Belize or Outer Mongolia, it’s not entirely unprecedented for entire e-mailed manuscripts to wander to some fairly surprising places. Yes, the same thing COULD conceivably happen with a hard copy, too, but it would require more effort on the sender’s part.

Which, believe it or not, is part of the function of the SASE: to maximize the probability that your manuscript will come back to you, rather than being carted off by goodness knows whom to parts unknown.

Stop laughing — it’s true. When you send requested materials off to an agency or publishing house, you and they both are operating on the tacit assumption that they will not reproduce your work without your permission, right? The mere fact that you give them a physical copy of your work doesn’t mean that you intent to authorize them to show it to anyone else until you sign a contract that explicitly grants them the right to do so, right?

When you include a SASE with your submission packet, you are implicitly asserting your right to control where your work is sent next. It conveys your expectation that if they reject it, they will mail it back to you, rather than forwarding it to the kind of pirate press that is currently cranking out the 8th, 9th, and 10th installments in the Harry Potter series.

The key word to remember here is control. Until you have signed a contract with a reputable agent or publishing house (or are selling copies that you published yourself), you will want to know with absolute certainty where every extant copy of your manuscript is at all times.

If that last sentence gave you even a twinge of compunction about work already written and sent upon its merry way: honey, we need to speak further, and pronto. However, that conversation, along with steps you can take to prove when you wrote a particular piece, is best left until next time.

In the meantime, don’t worry; keeping a watchful eye your work isn’t all that difficult, and it certainly doesn’t require living in a state of perpetual paranoia. Just a bit of advance thought and care.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on A few words on feedback, part IV: the book doctors’ consultation club

A few words on feedback, part IV: the book doctors’ consultation club

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THAT’S how dark it is up Seattle way these days, my friends: I took this picture at noon, and still the cats were battling for time in front of the lightbox. (As was, apparently, a small cactus, but that’s another story.)

Throughout this series, I have been examining various possibilities for finding non-professional (read: unpaid) feedback for your book before you send it out to agents and editors. The timing is not entirely accidental, of course: as I had mentioned several times before year’s end, the first three weeks of any new year are NOT a good time for either querying or submission.

Blame all of those New Year’s resolutions to send out materials: the volume of incoming mail in your garden-variety agency increases exponentially this time of year.

By Martin Luther King, Jr. Day — that’s January 21, for those of you outside the U.S. — however, most of those resolvers will have run out of steam. (I’m not being negative about good intentions; the average New Year’s resolution lasts a touch over three weeks.) Shortly thereafter, Millicent’s cohort of intrepid agency screeners will have dug themselves out from under the piles on their desks by doing what they do best: rejecting as many queries and submissions as quickly as they can.

Grumpily. It’s not the best time to query or submit.

Spend your time revising instead — and seeking out good feedback. Better still, try pulling together a team of first readers capable of catching a lot of different kinds of problems AND identifying your book’s strengths.

I’m not just talking about crackerjack fellow writers here. I’m also referring to readers in your target demographic.

Not to knock writers’ groups, of course: if the mix is right, they can be marvelous sources of trenchant feedback. But every group is different, and often, groups are organized on the basis of friendship or general affinity, rather than shared genre or level of writing experience.

All of these factor are worth considering because, let’s face it, not every talented writer may be the best choice to offer critique on a particular book, any more than any given agent or editor would be the right fit for it.

What you are seeking here is a specialist who can diagnose your book’s problems and prescribe workable solutions. Which means, alas, that even a critique group made up of the most brilliant, cutting-edge, eagle-eyed writers won’t necessarily yield the best feedback for your work.

After all, just because a writer is intelligent and knows a lot about craft doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s familiar with the specific likes and dislikes of a target demographic other than his own, or that a great nonfiction writer would necessarily be able to pinpoint the problems in a novel.

Admittedly, whenever any two writers are exchanging manuscripts for critique, lack of agreement upon what is and isn’t fair game for criticism can lead to trouble, but in a group, advance discussion of goals is even more imperative. If the mix of philosophies is not right — if, for instance, various members are writing in genres with wildly disparate conventions, such as literary fiction and mystery — or if members have different ideas about how much feedback is appropriate, being a member can be more frustrating than empowering.

I could give you literally hundreds of specific examples, but I don’t want to tell tales out of school. Suffice it to say that as an editor, I constantly get queries from potential clients whose creative NF is being ripped apart by the novelists in their critique groups, whose mysteries are being dismissed as characterization-light by literary fiction writers, whose romances aimed at the under-20 set are garnering frowns from the over-60s.

Considering how widely book categories and reading tastes can vary, this is perhaps not entirely surprising.

In the early stages of the writing process, when you are concentrating on story and structure, intra-group differences may be minimal, but if I had a dime for every memoirist who was told by advocates of tight first-person fiction to scrap any effort at objectivity, or women’s fiction writers told by thriller writers to add more sex and violence to the book, I would own my own publishing house.

Where I would publish all of your work, naturally. Perhaps I should start soliciting those dimes.

Writers’ groups can also become a bit stale over time, as members become inured to one another’s literary foibles and quirks. Resentment over past advice not taken can certainly add up as the months go by (for a really good example of this, please see the comments on Part II of this series), and it’s not uncommon for heavy commenters and light commenters to mutter under their breath at one another’s habits.

Not to mention how easy it is to find oneself starting to cater to the tastes of one’s writer’s group. No wonder some pros advise changing critique groups often, or joining more than one.

Am I suggesting that? Well, I might, if I thought you had more time on your hands. But frankly, most of the aspiring writers I know would have considered themselves lucky to be able to grab two consecutive hours for revision during the recent holiday season. Adding yet another time commitment (and if you hold up your end, a writers’ group can be a very serious one) may not be possible for everyone.

So I’m going to streamline my advice a bit. If you are a member of a writers’ group, and you feel that you have not been getting overly useful feedback on your work, you might want to consider whether its members actually are in your target demographic — and if they are not, either switching groups or adding a few outside readers to your feedback team.

As when you are considering any potential first reader, set aside for the moment whether you like the people in your group, or whether you respect them, or whether they have already published books outside your field. Look very carefully at their respective backgrounds and ask yourself: are these the kind of people I expect to buy my book? If they did not know me, would they buy it at all?

If the answer to either is no, go out and find some people who are and will, pronto.

Where should you start looking, you ask? Well, last time, I brought up the notion of approaching readers in your book’s target demographic who might NOT currently be die-hard book-buyers: a third-grade classroom’s worth of potential readers for a children’s book, for instance, or followers of a sport featured prominently in your novel.

This advice may have seemed a tad counter-intuitive: in an earlier post, I had advised getting feedback from inveterate readers of your chosen genre or field, who would already be familiar with the conventions, limitations, and joys possible in books like yours. All of which, of course, can be highly useful background for a critiquer.

Yet it’s also worth considering adding at least one first reader who isn’t a hard-core reader to your team as well. Getting feedback from those who do not read voraciously can sometimes give a writer great insight unavailable from any other source.

Why? Well, in marketing terms, if you can make a case that your book is ideally suited to address the under-served needs of your target demographic — in essence, that it provides those readers with something no recent book aimed at them delivers — that’s a marvelous selling point.

Feedback from folks actually in the demographic will, obviously, provide you with tips on how to achieve that admirable goal. This is especially true if you write nonfiction, as you will need to give details in your book proposal about who your target readers are and how you intend to reach them.

And you can stop rolling your eyes, fiction writers: these days, nonfiction writers are not the only ones expected to be able to say who is likely to read their books and why. Gone are the days when a writer could get away with a shrug and a dismissive, “Anyone interested in literature, I suppose.”

Let’s say you’ve written a lifestyle book for former high school athletes who no longer exercise — a rather large slice of the population, or so I would surmise from the fact that at my last high school reunion, a good two-thirds of my former female classmates seemed to be married to men who answered this description. Three of your five chapters are filled with recipes for fiber-filled bran muffins, salads, and trail mix. Where would you turn for first readers?

Naturally, because you paid attention to an earlier post in this series, you would want to include among your first readers someone familiar with cookbooks, as well as someone who reads a lot of exercise books, right? They would represent the parts of your target market who already buy books like yours.

It would also be well worth your while to seek out jocks from your old high school who have never opened either a cookbook or exercise book before, because they are the underserved part of your target market. In theory, if you can tailor your book’s advice so it makes abundant sense for your old volleyball buddy, you’ll know you have a good shot at writing for people like her.

Hey, you might as well get SOME use from all of those nagging messages Classmates.com keeps sending you about getting back in touch with old playmates, right?

Which leads me to my next tip: find different readers to meet your book’s different needs.

Most of us would like to think that anything we write will invariably touch any given reader, but in actuality, that’s seldom the case. I, for instance, am no fan of golf (I dislike plaid in virtually all of its manifestations), and thus would be a terrible first reader for a book about any of its multifarious aspects. But remember my buddy Mary Hutchings Reed, one of the authors kind enough to let me interview her on the ups and downs of self-publishing a few weeks back? She is an avid golfer, so much so that she’s written a terrific musical on the subject, FAIRWAYS, currently gracing your better country clubs across the nation.

Let me ask you: given the choice between a reader predisposed toward a subject and one who isn’t, which is more likely to get into a book about it deeply enough to give good feedback? Perhaps more to the point, which is more likely to take time out of her busy schedule to do you the favor of giving your book a close read, gratis? (None of this should be construed as my urging you to send Mary your golfing manuscripts, incidentally.)

Nor is it often the case that we happen to have an array of first readers easily at our disposal — although, again, if you join a well-constructed writers’ group, you will in fact have gained precisely that. In the absence of such a preassembled group, though, you can still cobble together the equivalent, if you think long and hard about what individual aspects of your book could use examination.

Once you’ve identified these needs, you can ask each of your chosen readers to read very explicitly with an eye to her own area of expertise, so to speak.

In the lifestyle book example above, it was easy to see how readers from different backgrounds could each serve the book: the cookbook reader could evaluate the recipes, the former athlete could comment on the ease of the exercises, and so forth. With fiction, however, the book’s various needs may be harder to define.

In a pinch, you can always fall back on finding a reader in the same demographic as your protagonist, or even a particular character — specialized readers can be a positive boon to a writer seeking verisimilitude. If a major character is an accountant, try asking an accountant to read the book for professional accuracy. I know many teenagers who get a HUGE kick out of critiquing adult writers’ impressions of what teenage characters are like. And so forth.

Even if you are writing about vampires or fantasy creatures, chances are that some regular Joes turn up in your stories from time to time. If only as soon-to-be-sucked-dry victims.

Naturally, another writer will probably give you more feedback on craft than the sculptor you asked to give his opinion on the use of clay in the book, but what’s wrong with that? You’re assembling a team of specialists, not looking for an all-wise, all-knowing single critiquer.

What does all of this have to do with the cat sitting in front of the lightbox, you ask? Your guess is as good as mine. As always, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 7 Comments on My Path to Publication (so far) by guest blogger Thomas Norman DeWolf

My Path to Publication (so far) by guest blogger Thomas Norman DeWolf

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Today, I am pleased to present the last of my holiday treats for all of the members of the Author! Author! community, and let me tell you, it’s a peach. Longtime blog reader Thomas DeWolf, whose fascinating book, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History will be coming out January 9th (congratulations again, Tom!), has graciously given into my blandishments and agreed to share his experiences with us. He has even — brace yourselves — agreed to give us an author’s-eye view of what happened when throughout the publication process.

Pretty great, eh?

A couple of years ago, Tom was precisely where so many of the members of our little community are: he had a good manuscript to pitch, but was new to the publishing industry. Through a willingness to learn the ropes, persistence, and having a heck of a good story to tell, he was able to bring his book to publication.

He is living proof, in short, that it IS possible — and Tom has very kindly agreed to take the time during the INCREDIBLY busy last weeks before publication to tell us about it. (To give a tangible sense of just how busy he must be right now, and thus what a kindness this is: I have it on pretty reliable authority that Amazon has already started shipping the presale copies.)

So please join me in thanking him for joining us. Take it away, Tom!

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Thank you, Anne, both for announcing the upcoming publication of my book, Inheriting the Trade, and for inviting me to write this “guest blog” for your site. Based on your message that your readers appreciate hearing about the post-contract phase of the publication process, here’s the condensed version of my experience so far:

For several years, as I dreamed of holding a hardbound book with my name inscribed on the cover and spine for the first time, I did my best to figure out how others successfully navigated the confusing, sometimes twisted path to publication. I attended trade shows to rub elbows with authors. I went to author readings and watched them on C-Span’s Book TV. I read about them. I asked for advice. I tried not to be too obnoxious, but occasionally probably was (sorry about shoving my children’s book manuscript into your hands, Richard Bach, I trust that the bruises have healed…).

My path over the past couple of years included attending both the American Society of Journalists and Authors’ annual writing conference in New York in April 2006 and the Pacific Northwest Writers Association’s annual conference in Seattle in July that same year. I couldn’t afford it. I went anyway. Prior to PNWA I found Anne Mini’s blog through her “resident writer” posts on the PNWA website. In addition to the helpful hints on writing in general—and my focus on query letters and book proposals specifically—I paid close attention to her profiles on agents. Based on the subject matter of my book I felt that about a dozen agents scheduled to attend the upcoming PNWA conference might be interested in my work. Rather than wait to approach them at the conference or after, I sent a query letter to each of them two weeks in advance of the conference. Approximately half of them responded to me before the conference began! All but one eventually asked to see my book proposal.

July 2006: At the conference, I took advantage of the Pitch Practicing Palace (sorry to learn it is no longer available), met every agent I could, or at least attended workshops where they were on the panel so I could confirm my impressions of their suitability for my book. I rewrote my book proposal for the umpteenth time and, after I returned home, sent it to the dozen agents who requested it.

September 2006: Within two months (and 16 rejections) after the conference, I received a call from Lauren Abramo, an agent with Dystel and Goderich Literary Management in New York who had attended PNWA. She offered to represent me (a moment’s pause while I relive my joyful scream…Yahoo! Okay, continue…).

After revising my book proposal to fit DGLM’s standards, Lauren sent copies to twenty publishers. In March 2007, I signed a contract with Beacon Press in Boston (pause again, more briefly due to looming deadlines… Yee-HAW! Okay, back to work…) and immediately began working with my editor, Gayatri Patnaik, to revise my manuscript. I understood that the typical publication timeframe, from contract to bookshelf, was at least 12-18 months. Beacon’s commitment with me was to have my book published in 10 months so that Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History would be available in time to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the United States (which occurred in January 1808).

My completed manuscript ran approximately 450 pages. My contract called for no more than 350 pages. Though I agreed to the page limit, I’d already pared it down, over many, many rewrites and edits, from my original 1500 page manuscript (I know, I know, ridiculous, huh?), and couldn’t see how I could remove another 100 pages without cutting the heart out of my story.

March 20, 2007: Eleven days after reaching verbal agreement on a contract with Beacon Press (and one day after actually signing), I received the first half of my manuscript, along with comments from my editor, Gayatri. I actually didn’t even freak out. Yes, I realized, she’s cut a third of the first half of my book away. Yes, some of my favorite moments were gone. But I could see where she was headed. She has a vision for my book. This is going to work, I thought.

Then I received the second half of the manuscript with the rest of her comments. Now I freaked out. Key sections were eliminated. My last chapter, my favorite chapter in the whole book: gone. We talked. Gayatri explained that my book is her baby now, too. I need to trust her. She knows what she’s doing and part of her job is to protect me from myself. I had to think about that one for a bit.

Over the course of six weeks, we went through three complete revisions. Initially, first-timer that I am, I feared that the role of an editor was to simply take my work, cut-fix-shift-add-revise-submit-print it, and I would lose control over my work. That was not the case at all. I did as much writing in those six weeks as I had done the previous six months. Gayatri didn’t rewrite my manuscript. She told me what I needed to do to make the story work effectively. We cut sections, rewrote others, and added new ones. My 450 page manuscript that I agreed to cut down to 350 became 272. To this day I remain amazed at how that happened without my realizing it until after the fact. And even with all my “babies” we killed, I am pleased with our final manuscript.

May 2, 2007: My talk-every-day-sometimes-several-times-each-day routine with Gayatri abruptly halted. She handed me over to others for the next phase of the process and she moved on to other books. Copyediting is something completely foreign to me. Grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure are not my strong suits. But I’m learning. The manuscript was sent to the copyeditor hired by Beacon Press. She would copyedit the entire manuscript, and I would get it back, within three weeks. I sent the un-copyedited version of my newly revised (and incredibly thin!) manuscript to five others who are close to the project for their final input and fact-checking.

May 23, 2007: I received the copyedited manuscript and was given two weeks to review it, accept or reject proposed changes, and resolve any queries from the copyeditor. This would also be my last opportunity to make other necessary changes before the book was to be typeset. I read the manuscript three complete times, focusing on different aspects of the story each time (first, simple flow; second, making sure story arcs and character actions are complete and questions raised are all answered; third, nit-pick the details). I also learned a trick while reading Neil Gaiman’s website. He’s a heckuva blogger. I did a word search to check for “ly.” Most adverbs end in “ly” and this is a great way to locate and destroy them. The two new red pencils Beacon Press sent me to mark up the manuscript ended up as nubs. I returned the marked up (so much red; felt a bit like blood) pages to Beacon Press on June 6.

July 18, 2007: The fully-designed, typeset galleys for my book arrived via FedEx. I spent all day, every day for the next two weeks, proofreading my book. Four others agreed to proofread it as well and let me know what they found.

July 31, 2007: I returned the galleys to Beacon Press with approximately 55 proposed corrections and/or alterations that I felt were important and necessary for my book. And that was it. Other than responding to a few specific questions that resulted in a few more minor changes, I was finished writing my book.

August — October, 2007: I was surprised when my agent called to tell me she had sold the audio rights to Inheriting the Trade to Brilliance Audio (third brief pause to celebrate… Yippee!). Since my book is a memoir, I didn’t want anyone else’s voice narrating it but me. Brilliance agreed to allow me to audition for them. I downloaded some recording software to my computer and narrated the preface and first chapter along with an introduction that explained why I was the only logical choice to narrate my own work. Brilliance agreed and flew me to their studios in October where I worked with a director and an engineer to record my book over the course of three days. The audio version of Inheriting the Trade will be available at the same time the hardcover hits bookshelves in January.

The vast majority of my time since July has been dedicated to the business side of my book’s publication. I work closely with my publicist at Beacon Press to coordinate my book tour With strong support from James Perry, one of my distant cousins and fellow travelers in this journey who also happens to be quite savvy with computer technology (a trait I completely lack), we created a website and blog. I’ve read books on publicity (The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Publicity and Publicize Your Book), media training (Media Training A-Z), and “buzz” (Unleashing the Idea Virus and Building Buzz).

I’ve made contact with people in the media I know and have asked friends and colleagues to send me contact information on reporters they know, all of which I pass along to my publicist as she prepares to send press kits and review copies of my book to media outlets, large and small, around the country (with emphasis on cities I’ll visit on tour). My publicist is working to set up television, radio, and newspaper interviews wherever she can as soon as the book is published. I’m working on an Op-Ed that she wants to submit for publication. The variety of ways to publicize my book seems almost endless.

I’ve heard stories quite different from my experience. Working with Beacon Press has been as close to perfect as I can imagine. I have received support and advice from other people in this industry (including some gracious agents and editors that rejected my proposal) that has proven quite valuable to my journey. I’ll do my best to share more about my experience (as it unfolds) on my own blog and hope that it will provide those who share the dream of getting published with a few tidbits now and then that I hope will prove useful.

One additional thought for writers and aspiring writers: part of the business of writing is finding ways to raise the visibility of your work and you. If someone asks you to write a guest blog, and it is appropriate to your work or subject matter, you graciously comply. Then you provide a link to your own blog. And you write a post in your own blog that links to the guest post you’ve written. Hopefully, other bloggers will then write about your “guest blog” on their own sites; all of which contributes to increasing the visibility of your web presence and spreads the word about your book while also helping raise the visibility of the blogs you’re linking to. If you are learning about me and my book, Inheriting the Trade, for the first time here you’ve just experienced all the evidence you need that what I’ve just explained works.

Thanks again, Anne. It’s been great reconnecting. I wish you all the best and send kudos your way for keeping up your amazing blog that helps other writers in so many ways.

Thanks, Tom, and best of luck on your book!

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Posted on - 4 Comments on A few words on feedback, or, a proposition to which you should NOT say yes on New Year’s Eve

A few words on feedback, or, a proposition to which you should NOT say yes on New Year’s Eve

I’m posting late today, I’m afraid — the news about Benazir Bhutto, while not exactly a surprise, left me very much saddened. I have been following her career since I was in college; we share an alma mater, and my work-study job involved maintaining files on the doings of alumnae. (Yes, in the 1980s, Harvard did not house the men’s and women’s files together, nor did male and female undergraduates receive the same diploma. You’ve come a long way, baby!) Her story was so interesting that I kept an eye out for her even after it was no longer my job to do so. The world is less fascinating without her in it.

Back to business. I may be jumping the gun on the parade of virtue that prevails in early January, that period when folks are still adhering to their New Year’s resolutions, but as many writers have a day or two of vacation right around now, I thought this might be a good time to start talking about the revision process — and its ever-helpful first cousin, useful feedback.

To clarify the timing: we DO all know better than to send off our queries and submissions during the first three weeks of any given new year, right? Half the writers in the English-speaking world bravely embrace SIOA (Send It Out, Already!) as their New Year’s resolution.

The result: Millicent and everyone at her agency is swimming in exponentially more paper at that time of year than at any other — and in the U.S., agencies are required to get tax statements about the previous year’s sales to their clients by the end of January. The combination of stressors tends to make ‘em a mite grumpy — and, believe it or not, even more eager than usual to reject.

So in case I’m being a bit too subtle here: if you can’t t get requested materials out the door this week, hold off until after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Trust me on this one. The average New Year’s resolution lasts a touch under three weeks (one of the many reasons that I deplore them), so the influx of paper calms down pretty quickly. You can afford to wait until it does.

And while we’re re waiting: it’s revision time! Hooray!

I heard that giant collective guffaw from my long-term readers. “When,” you are asking yourselves, “does Anne think it ISN’T a good time to revise a manuscript? Or, at the very least, to scan it for common mistakes and deviations from standard format?”

Okay, you’ve got me there. I have been preaching that particular gospel quite a bit this month, and with good reason: it is absolutely vital to clear your manuscript (and query letter, and synopsis) of spelling and grammatical errors, pronto.

Or at least before you send it out in a few weeks, after all of those resolvers have gotten it out of their systems. Because you, clever homework-doer that you are, know that there is more to landing an agent than making a single push: success comes to those who keep trying again and again.

And since agency screeners tend to stop reading after just a couple of spelling or grammatical errors, giving a book an honest shot at getting picked up means taking the time to create clean copy. This is not a business where good enough is in fact good enough; technical perfection is expected.

Sound like familiar advice? It should; both of the successfully self-published authors in my recent interview series said precisely the same thing — it’s worth your time to rework the manuscript until it fairly shines. Which just goes to show you that the standards of excellence prevailing in the world of traditional publishing may not be as far from those of the self-published world as one may have heard.

Either way, the author is generally held responsible for mistakes, so you’ll want to minimize them.

Because technical perfection is so important, I implore you, DO NOT rely upon your word processing program’s spelling and grammar checker as your only source of proofreading. As any professional editor will tell you, they tend to be rife with technical errors — mine, for instance, regularly tells me to use the wrong form of there, their, and they’re — and it’s far too easy for a slip of the mouse to convince your dictionary to accept caseless when you mean ceaseless.

Spell check, by all means, but there is no substitute for the good ol’ human eye running down a PRINTED page of text for catching errors.

Why not proof on your computer monitor? Because, as those editors to whom I referred above will happily tell you, the screen is not the best place to proofread, even if you read every syllable aloud (which I recommend, particularly for novels that contain quite a bit of dialogue). It’s just too easy for the eyes and the brain to blur momentarily in the editing process, sliding past an error unseen.

Yes, even if you have a simply immense computer screen — this is an instance where size truly doesn’t matter. (And the masses rejoice!)

Since I edit professionally, I have a monitor that could easily balance a small litter of puppies on it. But I ALWAYS use hard copy for a final edit, both for my work and for my clients’. As my downstairs neighbor would, I’m sure, be overjoyed to tell you, if a deadline is close, I’m going to be sitting in my library, reading the relevant manuscript in its entirety, in hard copy, out loud.

I’m funny that way.

After you have proofed and poked the slower movements of your text, I STRONGLY urge you to have at least one third party reader take a gander at it. At the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, it is NOT the best idea in the world to be the only eyes who see your work before it lands on an agent’s or editor’s desk. (Or the press, if you are intending to self-publish.)

Gaining some outside perspective, via a trustworthy first reader, has many benefits. Most notably, good pre-submission feedback can enable you to weed out the rookie mistakes that tend to result in our old pal Millicent the screener’s choking on her coffee and reaching for the form rejection letter.

Like, for instance, misspelling your own name or address on the title page — which happens more than you might think. Hey, people are in a hurry.

Other than the simple fact that other eyes are more likely to catch mistakes than you are the 147th time you read a text, there is another reason that you should run your work by another human being before you submit them. I tremble to report this, but it is very, very common for writers to send off the first chapter or three of their novels WITHOUT EVER HAVING ANYONE ELSE READ THEM.

The result, of course, is that the agent’s feedback is the first time many writers EVER get an outside opinion of their work.

And, as those of you who have submitted to an agency lately know first-hand, that feedback is usually either minimal or non-existent. Or so generic that it could apply to any manuscript Millicent saw — remember, just because a rejection letter or e-mail is personalized with your name doesn’t necessarily mean that it was written freshly in response to reading your book. Stock phrases like I just didn’t fall in love with it, this is a tough market for fiction, and it doesn’t meet our needs at this time have graced rejection letters for many years; they are not intended as meaningful feedback, but as a polite negative.

It does not, in short, tend to be feedback that’s likely to help a writer improve his work before the next round of submissions. Your writing deserves feedback with content you can use.

Now, there are a lot of places you can receive such feedback. You can ask a professional freelance editor, as I described a few weeks ago; you can join a critique group; you can exchange with another writer. No one method is right for everybody, so you may need to experiment a little before figuring out how you most like to receive feedback.

But remember just before Christmas, when I was preparing you for that inevitable moment when some well-meaning co-celebrant leans over to ask, “So, dear, how’s your writing coming? Published anything yet?” No matter how sincerely this person asks to read your work, no matter how flattering her request may be, no matter how much she swears that she would love nothing better than to read it and tell you what she thinks — if this person is a close friend, lover, would-be or ex lover, or — sacre bleu! — a family member,

DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAKE THIS PERSON THE FIRST READER OF YOUR BOOK.

Long-term readers, chant it along with me now: the input of your best friend, your mother, your siblings, and/or your lover(s), however charming it may be, is unlikely to yield the kind of concrete, tangible feedback every writer needs. No offense to your kith and kin, but it’s true. Ties of affection do not necessarily good readers make.

Far be it from me to suggest that anyone who cares about you might be sweet and generous enough to lie to spare your feelings, but frankly, it happens. Be grateful that you have such supportive folks in your life. Cherish them; appreciate them; cling to them with the tenacity of an unusually insecure leech.

But DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAKE THESE PEOPLE THE FIRST READERS OF YOUR BOOK.

Get other first readers for your manuscripts, because a first reader who does not have the objectivity — or, often, the reading experience in your genre — to tell you the truth about your manuscript is simply not useful for a writer.

The closer the tie, the lower the objectivity — and no, smart people who read a lot are not exempt from this rule. Even if your father runs a major publishing house for a living, your sister is a high-flying agent, and your lover reviews major novelists regularly for THE WASHINGTON POST, they are unlikely to have the perspective necessary to give you objective feedback.

Why? Because they like you.

Don’t fault them for that. It’s their job to make you feel better about yourself — or to make you feel worse about yourself, depending upon your taste in relationships and familial patterns. So when your Aunt Ermintrude says she would just LOVE your manuscript (and trust me, at some point, she will; everyone likes the idea of getting a free advance peek at the next big bestseller), I give you my full permission to use me as your excuse for saying no.

Do it politely, of course, as if you were acting upon medical orders. “I’m sorry, but I’ve been advised by Dr. Mini that until I find an agent, I need to limit myself to objective readers,” or “I would love to, Aunt Ermintrude, but I have a writing group for feedback — what I need you for is support!” tends to go over MUCH better than “What, are you just trying to get out of buying a copy of the book?”

No one likes getting called on that. And, let’s face it, when you do have a book coming out, you DO want your Aunt Ermintrude to buy it — and to talk all of her friends into buying it.

If you think that professional writers don’t cadge on their relatives this way, think again; most of the pros I know keep mailing lists of everyone who has ever cut their hair, cleaned their teeth, listened to their son’s book reports, etc., to send a postcard the instant a new book of theirs comes out.

And for those of you who already have agents: break yourself of the habit NOW of promising free copies of your future books to your kith and kin. Since authors now receive so few copies — and are often expected to use those for promotion — it’s really, really common for the writer to end up having to BUY those promised freebies to distribute.

Yes, you read that correctly. Now picture everyone who has ever said to you, “Oh, you’ll have to send me a copy when it comes out.” It can be costly.

Promise to sign it for them instead. Get Aunt Ermintrude — and everyone else who loves you — used to the idea that supporting you means being willing to shell out hard cash for your book.

But DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAKE ANY OF THESE PEOPLE THE FIRST READER OF YOUR BOOK.

So on New Year’s Eve, should you find yourself wrapped in the arms of some charming, well-meaning soul who whispers those words that make the average aspiring writer melt like butter, I’d LOVE to read your book,” you will know what to say, right?

Right? Stop fantasizing about meeting a gorgeous stranger who wants to read your book and concentrate. Trust me, it will be better for both your book and your relationships with your loved ones if you thank him/her/them profusely — and say no.

Ditto with loved ones of every description. My mother is one of the best editors I’ve ever met, and naturally, she is eager to read my work, but we have both been in this business long enough to know that giving birth to a writer pretty much automatically disqualifies a reader from being particularly objective about that writer’s work.

I can feel that some of you still aren’t convinced. Perhaps you have kith and kin who just adore giving their unvarnished opinions to you, ostensibly for your own good. “Is it really worth worrying,” I hear voices out there saying, “that the cousin who told me I looked stupid in my prom dress will be afraid to tell me that Chapter Three doesn’t work? Since Grams has no problem telling me that she hates my husband, why should she hesitate to rip my novel to shreds, if it needs it?”

This is the other primary reason not to ask your loved ones for feedback, even if they are noted for their blithe indifference to any pain their truth-telling might cause to others: if you care about the advice-giver, it’s hard NOT to be emotionally involved in the response.

Ponder that for a moment, and you’ll see that it is true. If your favorite brother critiques your book, rightly or wrongly, it’s probably going to hurt more than if a member of your writing group gives precisely the same advice. And by the same token, the emotional baggage of the relationship, even if it is neatly packed and generally non-obtrusive, may make it harder to hear the advice qua advice.

Also — and I hesitate to bring this up, because, again, I’m sure your kith and kin are marvelous human beings — but all too often, critique by loved ones often runs in the other direction, particularly if you happen to be loved by the type the psychologists used to call passive-aggressive.

Seriously, I have had many, many editing clients come to me in tears because their significant others have pounced on the first typo of the manuscript as evidence that the writer should never have put pen to paper at all. Long-repressed sibling rivalries often jump for joy when they see a nice, juicy manuscript to sink their teeth into, and are you quite sure that your best friend ever forgave you for the time that your 4th-grade soccer team beat hers?

What you need is feedback on your BOOK, not on your relationships. Or, at least, that’s what you need in order to improve your book. (The state of your relationships is, of course, up to you.)

Which is why (hold your ears, because I’m about to start shouting again) YOU SHOULD NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAKE ANY OF THESE PEOPLE THE FIRST READER OF YOUR BOOK.

Often, too, when you are dealing with people unused to giving feedback, being overly-judgmental is not even a reflection of their opinions of your book: in many cases, being vicious is what people think giving feedback means. (And if you doubt this, take a gander at the first efforts of most movie reviewers — or, heck, if you happen to live in the Seattle metro region, at the majority of film reviews in the local free paper THE STRANGER, where most of the contributing writers evidently believe that the title of critic means that they should never, under any circumstances, say anything positive about a movie that might, say, induce a reader to go and see it. Given their editorial philosophy, I’m surprised to see any starred reviews at all in that paper.)

I’m not saying not to show your work to your kith and kin — if it makes you happy, do. But even if your Aunt Mary won a Pulitzer in criticism last year, you probably should not rely solely upon her critique of your manuscript.

Yes, I know: finding good first readers is a whole lot of work, especially if you live in a small town. But, at the risk of wearing out the record, if you are going to be called on a mistake, it is FAR better to be a little embarrassed by a good first reader than rejected by a hyper-critical agent, editor, or contest judge.

That way, you can fix the mistakes when the stakes are low — and, frankly, you are far more likely to get usable feedback. If you are one of the many too shy or too busy to show your work to others, yet are willing to send it out to be evaluated by grumpy literary assistants hyped up on seven lattes before lunch, consider carefully whether you really want your first reader to be someone who does not have either the time or the inclination to give you tangible feedback.

Because, really, will We’re sorry, but your manuscript does not meet our needs at this time tell you whether that orgy scene in Chapter 8 is the problem, or if it’s your constant use of the phrase “Wha-?” in dialogue?

Trust me, you need first readers who will tell you PRECISELY that.

Next time, I shall talk about strategies for getting the kind of good, solid feedback you need without treating your first readers like mere service-providers. (Hey, if you want to do this without engendering social obligations, you really should be working with a paid professional freelancer, rather than your friends.)

Until then, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on So you’re considering self-publishing, part V: a few more practical details

So you’re considering self-publishing, part V: a few more practical details

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I’ve taken the last couple of days off, not so much in recognition of the holiday associated with the Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver (a.k.a. Santa) as in response to the fact that in these dark days, long-term illness is apparently not generally regarded as sufficient excuse to absent oneself from festivities. At least, not if one has established a reputation as a good cook.

In other words, there’s no place like home for the hollandaise. (If you decided to co-opt that groaner, please give me credit. I’m rather fond of it.)

But now I’m back in the saddle, eager to polish off our special holiday treat, a discussion about self-publishing with two authors who have taken the plunge this year, fellow blogger and memoirist Beren deMotier and novelist Mary Hutchings Reed. Today, we’re going to dig our teeth into the meaty issues of inspiration, promotion, and just what happens after an author commits to bringing out her own work.

So please join me in welcoming back both. To begin, let’s remind ourselves what they have published and where an interested party might conceivably go to buy it.

marys-photo-jpeg.jpgMary Hutchings Reed, if you’ll recall, is the author of COURTING KATHLEEN HANNIGAN, which is being described as the ONE L for women lawyers. It is available on Amazon or directly from the author herself on her website.

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Courting Kathleen Hannigan tells the story of an ambitious woman lawyer, one of the first to join a male-dominated national law firm in the late seventies, whose rise to the top is threatened by a sex discrimination suit brought against the firm by a junior woman lawyer who is passed over for partnership because she doesn’t wear make-up or jewelry. When Kathleen Hannigan is called to testify, she is faced with a choice between her feminist principles and her own career success. Courting Kathleen Hannigan is a story for women and minorities everywhere who are curious about the social history of women in law, business and the professions, institutional firm cultures, and the sexual politics of businesses and law firms.

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Beren deMotier is the author of THE BRIDES OF MARCH. It’s available on Amazon, of course, but because I always like to plug a good independent bookstore, here’s a link to the book’s page at Powell’s, too.

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The Brides of March: Memoir of a Same-Sex Marriage is a lesbian bride’s eye view of marriage at a moment’s notice, with a bevy of brides, their coterie of children, donuts, newspaper reporters, screaming protesters, mothers of the brides who never thought they’d see the day, white wedding cake, and a houseful of happy heterosexuals toasting the marriage. But that was only the beginning as these private declarations of love became public fodder, fueling social commentary, letters to the editor, and the fires of political debate, when all the brides wanted was the opportunity to say “I do” in this candid, poignant, and frequently funny tale of lesbian moms getting to the church on time in Multnomah County.

Anne: One of the aspects of self-publishing — or private publishing, as you like to call it, Mary — that most appeals to aspiring writers is not having to compromise one’s artistic vision (or political vision, or style, etc.) in order to adhere to someone else’s standards. The other, I think, is the comparative speed with which a writer can see one’s work in print. After you committed to your press, how long was it before you actually held your book in your hand?

Mary: I was in the hands of a pro. (Suzie Isaacs at Ampersand.) The process was fast and smooth — I think less than 75 days.

Anne: I remember being stunned at how quickly the book showed up on my doorstep — and how spiffy the production values were. What about you, Beren? From how well put-together the book is, I would have assumed a lengthy turn-around time.

Beren: It was really fast. I think I submitted it on about March 2nd, and it was listed online on April 25th.

Anne: Criminy! Is that a normal turn-around rate for iUniverse?

Beren: I’d asked for an expedited schedule so that I could submit it to the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards, and iUniverse worked with me to make it happen. Of course, that meant that I had to do my part of the bargain quickly, too; if there were proofs to check, I did them right away.

Mary: There’s no reason, in private publishing, for there to be any delays. Suzie believed in the book and that it should be published, and she kept my spirits up. Every time you write a check—and my total, including 2000 copies, bookmarks, cards, advertisements, posters, etc. was around $20,000 — I needed her affirmations!!

Anne: That sound you just heard was half of my readers’ jaws hitting the floor, I suspect. How close to the actual printing date were you able to make changes?

Mary: On the galleys…I think I had the books two weeks later.

Beren: For me, it was about ten days. I was waiting for a blurb from a famous comedian and hoped it would come before publication. It did, and was able to be fitted on the cover with days to spare.

Anne: Oh, the very idea of that makes me drool. I’m used to dealing with traditional publishing houses, where it’s a year, minimum, between commitment and being able to put one’s hand upon a physical book — after weeks, and often months of discussion between departments on everything from the title (which, for a first book, the writer rarely gets to set) to structure to content. It was especially weird with my memoir, where I kept receiving editorial memos telling me that this or that part wasn’t important enough to include, but that I should add a lengthy section on something that didn’t particularly interest me. It felt as though my life were being edited, not just my book.

What was the editorial process like for you? Were the decisions entirely yours?

Beren: Ultimately, the decision is mine, but they have the right to not brand it as one of their better books should they choose. If I wasn’t able to get positive book reviews, the book wouldn’t be eligible for becoming an Editor’s Choice or Reader’s Choice book, which leads to standard wholesale terms.

Anne: That’s interesting. So if they like it enough, it’s more like going with a traditional publishing house.

Beren: So either it has to be darned good, or you have to pay them big bucks to edit it for you, which takes weeks.

Anne: What about you, Mary? Who got to decide on the book cover, typeface, final edits, et cetera?

Mary: All decisions were mine, but I’m glad that she engaged a top-notch designer who proposed several appropriate options. As to the cover—she did ask what concept I had in mind, and I was a little stuck. My husband came up with dressing up the Lady Justice statue in heels and pearls—the first draft was a bit Betty Boopish, and the graphic designer responded with the modern, sleek image that now is the cover.

I have to say I love the cover, and it does help to sell the book. Yes, people judge the book by its cover, and in this case I really hope they do!

Beren: I’m happy with the outcome, too.I did a lot in creating the look of the book. My spouse took the photo on the cover, and I was able to influence the design, font and colors used in the final product. It became a group project when we shared the photo and necessary copy with friends who all had an opinion on how it should look.

Anne: Did you find having so much control over the final product more empowering or stressful? Or did it depend upon what day it was?

Beren: Hmmm, how about both empowering and stressful?

Certainly knowing that the book would rise or fall based on my work and almost solely my work was a lot of pressure, but I went into it knowing what to expect and had educated myself about the expectations. I feared that the final copy would look photocopied and kind of pathetic, but that didn’t happen.

It seems like it would be nice to hand over a manuscript to a publisher and get a lovely book in return, but I know it isn’t that simple. However, that is my goal—I do want to have a traditional publisher for subsequent books so that there is immediate distribution potential to brick and mortar stores. I consider this my “spec” book, one that I can point to as an accomplished work, as well as eventually sell to a traditional publisher.

Mary: It’s a bit stressful. Even on the galleys, I found a place where I think I had the character approaching the court twice in the same scene.

Anne: But that happens in traditional publishing, too.

Mary: How many people over the years had read these couple of pages, including professional editors, and not noted that? It could drive you crazy. You do need to adopt a certain tolerance for imperfection—we call it being human.

What was the most stressful, however, was the worry that in my acknowledgements I may have failed to mention someone who thought they were important to the work. (I think I did get everyone—at least no one has complained yet.)

For me, the other stress factor is the “autobiographical” accusation: naturally, the book draws on my life experience, but there is no one-to-one correspondence between me and Kathleen Hannigan or any other character and any of my present or former partners or associates.

Anne: And then when you write a memoir, people want to believe that you made things up. It’s as though the fiction and nonfiction labels get mixed up.

Let’s move on to the next stage of the process. Most of us have heard that the biggest hurdles a self-published book has to overcome lie in distribution and promotion. Is that true?

Beren: Yes, I’d say those are the toughest parts. While most self-publishing companies have wholesale channels like Baker & Taylor and Ingram, bookstores are much less likely to buy the book if it isn’t returnable or on standard discounts.

Online, however, the book was readily available fast. It was on Amazon three days after being published, and more online bookstores keep adding it.

Mary: Ampersand set up the Amazon.com, Borders.com and Barnesandnoble.com distribution. I joined the National Association of Women’s Studies Programs in order to have the book listed on their website (and their click-through to Amazon, which benefits the Association if someone buys through that portal.) I also fulfill orders through my website.

Anne: How widely are your books available in bookstores, and how hard was it to set up those venues?

Beren: Locally, I was able to get about six bookstores to carry it, which is a good beginning. The local library bought 13 copies and it has been getting multiple holds.

Anne: Oh, just in case some of my readers are not aware of it, librarians will often order a book if it is requested often enough. I grew up around many, many well-respected authors who would recruit their kith and kin to call their local libraries using different voices to request their books.

I just mention. It also really, really helps authors if enthusiastic readers write reviews and post them on Amazon and B&N. Or in bookstores, to turn the books face-outward, rather than spine-out; a browser is far more likely to pick it up.

Now that traditional presses have shifted so much of the responsibility for promotion onto the author, I’ve been wondering how much more work you’ve had to put into promotion than an author of a similar work at a traditional press.

Mary: I put a fair amount of work into it. I’ve taken charge of sending out free copies to “opinion makers”—something which maybe a traditional publisher would do. I set up speaking engagements, with some help from my publisher.

I have a friend at the Star magazine, and he helped me get listed as the HOT BOOK in one of the October issues. That was a great boost to sales!

Anne: Are you solely responsible for the promotion of your book, or has your press helped you?

Beren: I am solely responsible for the promotion, though occasionally I get offers to pay for co-op advertising through iUniverse, or for them to feature my book at an event. So far, I’ve turned the offers down.

Luckily, my book does have current event appeal, so I’ve been able to get reviews online and in newspapers and magazines. (Gaywired, Mombian, About.com, Just Out), plus a couple of interviews in print and on the radio.

Anne: I’m glad you brought up reviews, Beren, because that’s something that agents and editors always bring up as a serious drawback to self-publishing: most print periodicals in the US, including the vast majority of daily newspapers, have policies that preclude reviewing privately published books. The Internet has really been a boon in terms of getting the word out there.

Your book has also been reviewed, hasn’t it, Mary?

Mary: I was featured in an article in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, and will be featured in a special Leading Lawyers publication of women lawyers in Illinois.

Anne: Have you come up with clever ways to promote your book that you
might want to share with us? No matter what press produces your book, ingenious marketing always helps.

Mary: Every time I sell a book, I include 3 postage-paid postcards (of the cover of the book) with a little sell copy on the message side, and ask readers to sign them and send them to 3 friends who might be interested. It’s my version of a viral marketing campaign.

I’d love a couple things: for Hillary or Michelle to carry it around (and I’ve put it in their hands through friends); for women’s studies programs to pick it up for a course on women in the professions—I sent it to Anita Hill and proposed a reading for the National Association of Women’s Studies Programs; for law schools to do the same.

I’ve sent it to some book club leaders, hoping they would recommend it. And a friend is working on the movie option. I sent it to the abovethelaw.com blogger, hoping he’d get interested (he’s a Yalie also). I’ve volunteered to speak at a Brown colloquium at my 35th reunion in May.

Anne: So you’ve been very proactive. What have been your clever promotion schemes, Beren?

Beren: Gosh, well, getting to know cool writers like Anne Mini is always helpful!

Anne: Shameless friends who love one’s writing belong in every writer’s toolkit. I’m constantly being asked by bookstore staff to stop moving my friends’ books to the bestseller tables. But seriously, what else?

Beren: I think contests and awards are a good bet for many writers. I’ve entered about nine for this book, so we’ll see in the spring if it turns out to be a good investment of time and money. With the contests, it involved a lot of copies sent to judges; I just have to trust that they will pay off eventually through wins, word of mouth, getting on the used bookshelves or sheer karma.

I sought out every review I got. I aimed for the specific markets that I knew would be interested in my book, and sent review copies out first thing when I got my 30 free copies. I used every single one for promotion. Eighty percent of those will never be reviewed (and there is a thriving used copy market thanks to me), but enough have that it has helped establish creds for the book, and jumping-off points for other avenues.

I also did a reading and talk at the local library, which was heavily advertised by the county library—there’s nothing like walking in looking for a book on tape and seeing your face in front of you on a poster. I also send out regular e-mails to friends about events and readings.

I did get contacted by an OPB radio interviewer and that was a thrill—she tried to find me!

I could do a lot more, but I’m also balancing freelance work, portrait painting, and raising three kids (two teens and a preschooler with special needs), so I’m kind of busy, though I count my blessings that I’m not also digging ditches eight hours a day on top of it all. I suspect that with a traditional publisher I’d have to do just as much, if not more, but that there would be more tools in place for contacts.

Anne: I’m perpetually in awe of writers who can be productive while caring for small children — possibly because I was for many years a small child being cared for by writers.

Beren: I’ve read several books on finding time to write as a mom, but one of them should address how to stay sane and really write when you’ve got a kid who can’t be out of your sight for a second, really can’t “play quietly” while you type away, and takes every ounce of creative energy to keep growing up uninjured! I’ve yet to read one that recommended a daily dose of Nyquil for the active, irrational tot. Maybe that’s my third book.

Anne: So you don’t have time to have writer’s block? Rats — I was going to ask about your strategies for overcoming it.

Beren: Oh boy, writer’s block — and I just gave up Diet Coke, too, so I can’t recommend guzzling it while at the keyboard. (Have you ever seen a room full of screenwriters at a conference? They all have a can of Diet Coke at their elbow.)

I helped myself get over writer’s block by creating a column with a deadline. It was great training. You have to edit yourself down and cut out your darlings, and you can’t just wait for inspiration to strike.

I do have a fair amount of discipline because I have to to be a writer. Choosing to have three kids and be a writer means jumping in whenever you have the time, or getting a lot done in a short time or taking opportunities as they arrive. These days I sit in my car and write while our youngest is in preschool for 2 hours four days a week, and get up at five for an hour or two before the mob is up.

Admittedly, I’m ready to collapse at eight o’clock at night, but that is how it has to be to get anything done. I’m hoping to have a social life in about five years.

Anne: At the risk of swerving into trite interview territory, what gives you the most inspiration as a writer?

Beren: Well, it is inspiring to know that my grandfather, David Duncan (best known for his screenplay for the 1960 The Time Machine), supported his family of five as a writer.

Anne: That’s a real advantage to being from a family of writers: knowing first-hand that it IS possible to make a living at it. It’s just rare. (And that was a very good screenplay, too, I thought.)

Beren: I also think of author Alice Bloch, who gives herself half an hour a day before working as a technical writer, and got a memoir done that way. I’ve read (Anne Lamott’s) Bird By Bird several times, and love Writing the Memoir, From Truth to Art by Judith Barrington.

Sometimes you care about something so much you have to write about it, and other times (like after walking through a bookstore full of other writers’ work) pride keeps me going: “If they can do it, so can I!” I also keep a file full of nice comments about my writing so that I can look them over if I’m feeling like chucking it in. Every positive thing about my writing that comes my way I grasp onto, to keep me swimming until the next buoy.

Mary: There are, of course, writers I love, but the best resource for me is life itself. I love being active, encountering new experiences, meeting new people, sharing with other writers. I think I actually get the most inspiration from my fellow writers—people like you, Anne, and my friends Julie Weary, Patricia McMillen, Lucia Blinn…the list goes on—all of us next to make it big in the commercial world.

Anne: Oh, I agree 100%: having writer friends in whose work you believe is SO important to keeping yourself going. You can get an incredible boost from a friend’s progress, and you can talk about the hard parts with people who honestly understand. If you don’t share your hopes and fears, they can so easily turn into the demons of self-doubt.

Which leads me to ask a totally unfair question that I think will be wildly interesting other writers: what was your biggest fear in embarking upon self-publishing, and did it actually come to pass?

Beren: That bookstores would laugh in my face if I came in with my book to sell on consignment. It only happened once (she didn’t actually laugh, but the condescending note was very present), though after talking about it with her, she admitted it might be a book they wanted to carry and took one new copy. Since then, they’ve sold several used copies, and carry it online.

Anne: I love it when the fears turn into triumphs. What about you, Mary?

Mary: My biggest fear is that I would end up with a living room full of boxes of books—that my friends would each buy one and that would be it.

I never expected that at a reading someone I’ve never met would march up to the table and buy 10 copies for her friends—and be sending them to friends in India and Pakistan and England! I do have a few boxes in my living room, but sales have been brisk.

Anne: So your demon of fear mutated into a triumph, too. That’s great.

Mary: I was also afraid that people would assume that because it was self-published, it wasn’t any good. But people don’t “get” that it is self-published. They just know it IS published.

Anne: That fascinates me, because we’re so often heard the opposite asserted at writers’ conferences. But then, I suppose agents and editors at traditional publishing houses don’t often have much contact with self-published authors — or at any rate, didn’t until fairly recently. I’ve keep meeting authors who published their own first books and were picked up on their next because the first sold so well.

Okay, I’ve been holding off on this next question, because I try not to deal in superlatives; life’s all about the gray areas, after all. But here it goes anyway: so far, what has been the best thing about the self-publishing
process for you?

Mary: It’s been fun! I’ve heard from people I’ve lost touch with—like I hadn’t spoken to them in 12 or 13 years, and they’d write and call and thank me for writing the book and say that they could totally relate to it.

Beren: The best thing was that it was fast, and I learned a lot about book creation and publishing. The more I know about the artistic and business aspects of writing, the better I will be (I trust), and no effort was wasted.

Anne: What has been the worst part?

Mary: The worst — sorry, N/A.

Anne: I’m really pleased to hear that.

Mary: My own worry, my own bruised ego.

Anne: Which are endemic to the querying and submission process, too. What do you think, Beren?

Beren: The worst part is that there are limitations to a self-published book in terms of wider wholesale distribution unless you self-publish yourself as a small press, or sell a certain amount of copies already (as in the case of iUniverse). Getting books in bookstores on a big scale is challenging.

Anne: I already asked Mary this last time, but if you had only a minute to give advice to someone who was thinking of self-publishing, what would you say?

Beren: Do your research, know your goals for publication and work very very hard at making your manuscript the best it can possibly be. On one writing weekend, after the book was essentially finished, I worked at making it the very best it could be, sentence by sentence, word by word, and in two long days I got forty pages done. But they were much better pages.

Work with the editor at the press or hire an editor, take your work seriously. It is important work.

Mary: Yes, invest in a manuscript editor so that you will have the confidence that your work is ready and deserving of being in print.

Anne: To sound like an agent for a moment, congratulations on your current success — what’s your next project?

Beren: I am currently gathering a collection of humorous stories about life in the lesbian mom trenches, reworking some old favorites and putting them together as a book I’m calling Maggots Before Breakfast, and other Interesting Adventures in a Cozy Liberal Enclave.

Anne: Literal maggots or figurative ones?

Beren: There is a story about maggots, and the original piece is on my website. I plan on pitching it to traditional publishers, using the kudos The Brides of March has garnered, as well as the platform I’m building through appearances, blogging, and articles.

Mary: I have a shopping bag full of novels. My most recent was a short-list finalist for the William Wisdom/William Faulkner Prize, and I am actively looking for an agent for that one. I do think it would be harder to self-publish a novel that is “just a literary novel” which is less directed to a particular audience. I would self-publish again, if it comes to that.

My most immediate “next writing project” is the made-for-television version of my musical Fairways, which will require some rewriting for the pilot (to be filmed in April/May), and finishing the script for my next musical, “We’re Cruising Now, Babe!”

Anne: Well, please come back and tell us all about these projects down the line.

I can’t thank you enough for sharing your insights with us — I’ve truly enjoyed hearing aobut your experiences. Best of luck with your books, and as we like to say here at Author! Author!, keep up the good work!

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Beren deMotier has written humor/social commentary for Curve, And Baby, Pride Parenting, Greenlight.com, www.ehow.com, as well as for GLBT newspapers across the nation. She’s written about same-sex marriage for over a decade, and couldn’t resist writing the bride’s eye view after marrying in Multnomah County. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her spouse of twenty-one years, their three children, and a Labrador the size of a small horse.

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Ever since turning 40 a few years ago, Mary Hutchings Reed Mary has been trying to become harder to introduce, and, at 56, she finds she’s been succeeding. Her conventional resume includes both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Brown University (both completed within the same four years, and she still graduated Phi Beta Kappa), a law degree from Yale, and thirty-one years of practicing law, first with Sidley & Austin and then with Winston & Strawn, two of the largest firms in Chicago. She was a partner at both in the advertising, trademark, copyright, entertainment and sports law areas, and now is Of counsel to Winston, which gives her time to write, do community service and pursue hobbies such as golf, sailing, tennis, and bridge.

For many years, she has served on the boards of various nonprofit organizations, including American Civil Liberties
Union of Illinois, YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago, Off the Street Club and the Chicago Bar Foundation. She currently serves on the board of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago (and chair of its fundraising committee); Steel Beam Theatre, and her longest-standing service involvement, Lawyers for the Creative Arts.

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