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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!

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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 - 11 Comments on Control, or, yet another reason that New Year’s resolutions about speedy publication may not be the best idea

Control, or, yet another reason that New Year’s resolutions about speedy publication may not be the best idea

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I had intended to post another installment in my series on getting good feedback today, but I have to say, some of the holiday cards I’ve been receiving from writers over the last couple of weeks have given me pause. Why, you ask? Well, I am lucky enough to know writers at every stage of the process: published, unpublished, agented and unagented, living and dead. And while the living are marginally more likely to drop me tidings of their work around this time of year, I’ve noticed that whether the writer in question is just beginning a book or just finishing one, just starting the querying process or fifteen years into same, waiting to hear back from editors or agents, fulfilling a book contract, promoting a book, or in the throes of her eighth, every single one expresses the same longing: to have more control over how quickly the process goes.

Because, really, can any of us quite believe just HOW long it takes?

So today, the for my last post of 2007, I am going to address one of the great irritations of a writer’s life: the stress of having to wait, often for long periods, for someone else to make decisions that have a vital impact upon your life and your art.

Every writer who has ever queried an agent, submitted to a small press, or entered a contest is familiar with this peculiar species of stress, right? You pour your heart, soul, and hopes into that submission, send it off — and then find yourself in a seemingly endless limbo, waiting to hear back.

And you wait quietly, because you have heard (accurately) that there’s nothing an agent or editor hates more than being contacted by a nervous writer demanding, “Well? What do you think?” As the days pass, you tell yourself that agencies and publishing houses get stacks of submissions daily, and contests get a lot of submissions, so you should not expect yours to be read right away.

But still, you hope that today, TODAY will be the day when that blasted suspense will end.

Then, as the days stretch into weeks (and sometimes into months), you might start to fantasize scenarios that explain the long delay, a natural impulse for a creative mind to have. If you were asked to send the first 50 pages or the whole manuscript, you might convince yourself that the agent just can’t make up her mind, and thus needs to have everyone in the agency read the submission, too, or that the editor at the small publishing house has taken the book home, so he can read through it again slowly.

Or perhaps a small dragon came bursting into the agency, breathing fire upon the waiting manuscripts, and the agent who loved your pitch at the conference was just too embarrassed to tell you. Rather than forcing Millicent to patch together all of those scorched fragments, you might reason, wouldn’t it be easier if you just sent another copy? Maybe it would be a kindness if you called to check.

Whatever your reasoning might be, you go through agonies, trying to figure out whether to call or not. But because every writers’ publication you have ever seen and conference speaker you have ever heard has told you that agents and editors positively HATE it when writers make follow-up calls, you sit tight.

As time passes, your fantasies start to take on a more sinister aspect. Maybe they’ve lost your address, along with half of your manuscript. (If only you’d put your e-mail address in the slug line, so every page would have contained your contact information!) Maybe a first reader at the agency, an aspiring writer himself, was overcome with jealousy at your matchless prose and threw your manuscript away. (The jerk probably did not even recycle it. That type never does.) Maybe your protagonist reminded the agent so forcibly of her late husband, tragically lost a month ago in a freak ballooning accident, that she has not been able to make it through more than five consecutive pages without bursting into tears and needing to be carried bodily to her therapist’s office.

Or, still worse, did you forget to send a SASE?

By now, you have bite marks on your hand from forcibly restraining yourself from picking up the phone to ask what’s going on with your manuscript. Yet in your heart (and, in some cases, from reading this blog), you know that none of the elaborate explanations you’ve concocted are very likely to be true, right?

99.9% of the time, if the author has not heard back, the submission has not been read yet. (The other .1% of the time, the submission has been lost AND hasn’t been read.)

When it’s your manuscript out there, it’s tough to remember that delay is very seldom a vacillation problem, but a lack of time: queries, excerpts, and entire manuscripts often languish on the corners of desks for months before the right people have an opportunity to read it. And if an agent or editor likes the first few pages, it is not uncommon for her to take it home, intending to read it in her spare time — where it has to compete with spouses, children, exercise, and all of the other manuscripts that made their way home.

All of this spells delay, and bless your heart, you try to be reasonable about it. Even when the pressure of waiting is migraine-inducing (for some reason that medical science has yet to pin down, writers seem more susceptible to migraines than other people; on the bright side, we seem to be far less susceptible to Alzheimer’s), you keep your little chin up.

And, if you’ve been at it awhile, you bitch to your writer friends about it — because, frankly, after years living with this kind of anxiety, your non-writing kith and kin have gotten a trifle impatient with your delay-induced stress. (If you have not yet discovered the balm of talking through your anxiety with someone who’s been through it herself, run, don’t walk, to your nearest writers’ conference to make some friends.)

It doesn’t take long before you find yourself wishing that you hadn’t, in your joy at being asked to submit material, spread the good news quite so widely. Within a remarkably short time after you’ve started to arrive at work with big dark circles under your eyes, coworkers will start to ask, annoyingly, “Why do you put yourself through this?” Your mother worries audibly about your health and sanity. Your partner suggests tentatively that if you took a third mortgage on the house, perhaps you could afford to self-publish. Anything to end the stress.

But allowing writers to languish while minds are made up is, as we know, is how the publishing industry works. No matter how good your writing is, if you’re in it for the long haul, you must live through these long periods of nail-shredding anxiety.

Actually, good writers generally have to put up with it more than bad ones, and professional writers more than unprofessional ones, because poor writing and poor presentation tends to get rejected at the speed of light. Literally: as soon as the first few sentences of a rejectable piece hit the retina of a screener, that manuscript is toast.

At the risk of depressing you into a stupor, these waiting periods do not go away once you have landed a terrific agent. Nor do they become substantially shorter or less stressful, a fact that has come as a surprise to every successfully published writer I know. (Hello, Christmas card list.)

Because, alas, reading speeds do not increase as a manuscript inches along the road to publication. Once you sign with your dream agent and whip your manuscript or proposal into fighting trim, the agent will send it out to editors — frequently waiting to hear from one before moving on to the next.

Cast your mind back a few paragraphs ago, to all of the things that can distract an editor from reading a manuscript, and it may not surprise you to hear that even great writers with magnificent agents end up waiting for months to hear back from a single editor. Then, once the editor decides she likes the book enough to acquire it, she has to pitch it to the rest of the publishing house. More delays.

I tremble to tell you this, but as I can tell you from personal experience, equally great potential for stalling abounds after the publishing contract is signed. Many, many people need to approve each step, from the editor to the publisher to the copyeditor, proofreader, and marketing department.

At any stage, the process could stall — or you could be asked to make a major revision at any point between the editor’s first read of your manuscript and when it is actually printed. It’s not unheard-of, for instance, for an editor to leave a publishing house mid-project, landing a book with a new editor with an entirely different opinion about how it should read. Or even — are you sitting down? — for an author whose book garners poor advance reviews (the industry-specific reviews that come out long before the book is available for sale to consumers) to be asked to make revisions THEN.

In this business, a book is not finished until it is actually sitting on a shelf at Barnes & Noble, a fact that has had writers gnawing the bark of nearby trees in frustration for my entire lifetime, at least.

Why am I darkening the last day of 2007 by telling you this? So that in 2008, you will not fall into the trap of thinking that delays are a negative review of your writing.

Long waits are not a reflection upon the quality of your writing, or even necessarily of its marketability, but rather a function of how the industry works. So please, please, don’t beat yourself up with worry in the dead of night — but do provide yourself with a support group of people who will understand and sympathize with your frustration.

Because, as I pointed out just before Christmas, well-meaning folks who don’t know how the business works will keep peppering you with unintentionally cruel questions like, “So, when is your novel coming out?” They will be astonished when their friendly concern causes you to burst into tears, because some agent has been sitting on your first three chapters for the past nine weeks; other writers will be neither surprised nor blame you for it.

That’s why it’s a good idea to start building your support system long before you finish your first book, for otherwise, most of the people around you will have a hard time understanding that difficulty in attracting an agent, or your agent’s having trouble placing the book, is not necessarily a reflection of your talent as a writer.

You can tell yourself that 20 times a day while you’re waiting to hear back, but that doesn’t mean their unspoken dismay does not hurt. The important thing to remember is that while your work is about who you are, the way the industry treats writers isn’t.

When I was a kid, my older brother’s favorite joke was a shaggy dog story about an old man leading his heavily-laden burro from village to village across a long stretch of desert. Every time they near anything that looks remotely like a water source, the burro asks, “May I have a drink now?” Each time, the heartless old man replies, “Patience, jackass, patience.” My brother could keep the patter up for half an hour at a time, weaving it through a lengthy and ever-changing tale about the old man’s adventures: at each stop, no matter where, the same question, the same response: “Patience, jackass, patience.”

Naturally, what made the joke so appealing to a prepubescent boy bent upon tormenting his little sister was the ultimate pay-off: after so much repetition, the listener would inevitably either express some wonder whether the story was ever going to reach its point. And then the teller could chide her: “Patience, jackass, patience.”

After the first telling (out of, if my recollection is correct, approximately 4700), I tried my best to stay still, to say nothing, to pretend I didn’t even hear him, but eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. Even running away as fast as possible the moment he uttered the first line of the joke gave him the excuse to shout it after me: “Patience, jackass, patience!”

If only I had known that he was preparing me for a life as a writer. In the face of such relentless taunting, it honestly does take practice to sail through it all with one’s sense of humor intact — and without beginning to wonder what one could possibly have done in this lifetime or the last to deserve such slow torture.

Trust me, neither you nor your book has done anything to deserve it: it’s merely that the timing of acceptance or rejection is utterly, completely, excruciatingly out of the writer’s control.

Oh, and if an agency’s had your first 50 pages or entire manuscript for a couple of months, it’s perfectly okay to call or e-mail; the manuscript might genuinely be one of the .1% that has gotten lost, and if you wait much more than 3 months to follow up, the chances of their finding it are slim to none. (The rule of thumb is that you SHOULD call if you haven’t heard back in double the time that they specified.) Mum’s the word when you’re querying, though, or if you sent an unsolicited manuscript, or if you’re dealing with one of those annoying agencies that tells submitters up front that they will respond only if the answer is yes.

Happy New Year, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 8 Comments on See for yourself, part III: God bless the Millicents, every one

See for yourself, part III: God bless the Millicents, every one

For the last couple of days, I’ve been pursuing the dual goals of trying to show you just how obvious it is to a professional reader when a submission ISN’T in standard manuscript format (as opposed to being set up to ape the format of published books) and to drum up a little holiday sympathy for Millicent, everybody’s favorite agency screener.

She’s the Tiny Tim of the literary world, you know; at least the Bob Cratchits a little higher up on the office totem pole get paid, but our Millie often doesn’t. Even if she’s not an intern, she’s still unlikely to be paid very much. Her hours are typically long, and quite a lot of what she reads in the course of her day is, let’s face it, God-awful.

Yes, that thought that suddenly sprang into your mind is precisely right: rejecting queries and manuscripts by the score IS considered on-the-job training for a fledgling agent, in much the same way as an editorial assistant’s screening manuscripts at a publishing houses is the stepping-stone to becoming an editor.

You didn’t think determining a manuscript’s literary merits after just a few lines of text was a skill that came naturally, did you?

The aspiring writer’s learning curve is often not dissimilar to Millicent’s, actually: no one is born knowing the rules of manuscript formatting. (Okay, so I practically was, growing up around so many writers, but that’s a rare exception.) Like Millicent, most of us learn the ropes only through reading a great deal.

She has the advantage over us, though: she gets to read books in manuscript form, and most aspiring writers, especially at the beginning of their journeys to publication, read mostly books. The format is, as I believe that I have pointed out, oh, several hundred times before in this very forum, quite different.

So what writers tend to produce in their early submissions are essentially imitations of books. The problem is, there are many reasons that a manuscript in book format would be hard for an agent or editor to handle — and not merely because the individual pages would appear unprofessional to Millicent.

For starters, published books are printed on both sides of the page, manuscripts on one. Why the difference, in these days of declining tree populations and editors huffily informing writers at conferences that paper is expensive?

Simple: it’s easier to edit that way.

Believe it or not, even in these days of widely available word processors, most professional editing is still done by hand. It’s hard to give trenchant feedback while traveling in a crowded subway car if you have to maneuver a laptop, and many agencies remain far too virus-fearful to allow their employees solicit attachments from writers who aren’t already clients. (Even those who do generally have a policy that forbids the opening of unsolicited attachments.)

But ultimately, most editors edit in hard copy because they prefer it. The human eye is, of course, to blame for this: reading comprehension drops by about 70% when the material is presented on a computer screen; the eye tends to skim.

Which is why — you can hear this coming, can’t you? — a wise writer always reads her ENTIRE manuscript IN HARD COPY before submitting it to anyone even vaguely affiliated with the publishing industry. It’s much, much easier to catch typos and logic problems that way.

Manuscripts should also be typed (don’t laugh; it’s not unheard-of for diagrams to be hand-drawn in submissions, or for late-caught typos to be corrected in pen), double-spaced, and have 1-inch margins all the way around. To call upon our old friend Dickens again, an average page of a manuscript should look like this:

snapshot-2007-12-13-00-09-57.tiff

(If you’re having trouble seeing specifics, or just aren’t seeing an image at all, try right-clicking on the image and saving it to your hard disk.)

To give you some idea of just how difficult — or even impossible — it would be to hand-edit a manuscript that was NOT double-spaced or had smaller margins, take a gander at this little monstrosity:

snapshot-2007-12-13-00-11-28.tiff

Reader-hostile, isn’t it? Even with nice, empty back pages upon which to scrawl copy edits, trying to cram spelling or grammatical changes between those lines would be well-nigh impossible. Knowing that, Millicent would never dream of passing such a manuscript along to the agent who employs her; to do so would be to invite a lecture on the vicissitudes of the editorial life.

Don’t tempt her just to reject it unread — and don’t, I beg you, provide the same temptation to a contest judge.

You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, past contest entrants and submitters who wanted to squeeze in a particularly exciting scene before the end of those requested 50 pages? Faced with a hard-and-fast page limit for submission, some wily writers will shrink the font or the margins, to shoehorn a few more words onto each page. After all, who is going to notice a tenth of an inch sliced off a left or right margin, or notice that the typeface is a trifle smaller than usual?

Millicent will notice, that’s who, and practically instantly. As will any reasonably experienced contest judge; after hours on end of reading 12-point type within 1-inch margins, a reader develops a visceral sense of when something is off.

Don’t believe me? Go back and study today’s first example, the correctly formatted average page. Then take a look at this:

snapshot-2007-12-13-00-13-48.tiff

I shaved only one-tenth of an inch off each margin and shrunk the text by 5% — far less than most fudgers attempt. Yet admit it — you can tell it’s different, can’t you, even without whipping out a ruler?

So could a professional reader. And let me tell you, neither the Millicents of this world nor the contest judges tend to appreciate attempts to trick them into extraneous reading. Next!

The same principle applies, incidentally, to query letters: often, aspiring writers, despairing of fitting a coherent summary of their books within the standard single page, will shrink the margins or typeface. Trust me, someone who reads queries all day, every day, will be able to tell.

The other commonly-fudged spacing technique involves skipping only one space after periods and colons, rather than the grammatically-requisite two spaces. Frequently, writers won’t even realize that this IS fudging: ever since published books began omitting these spaces in order to save paper, I’ve seen a theory propounded all over the Internet (and sometimes even in writing classes, where the teachers should know better) claiming that skipping the extra space is obsolete. Frequently, the proponents will insist that manuscripts that include the space look old-fashioned to agents and editors.

Well, guess what: standard manuscript format IS old-fashioned, by definition; that fact doesn’t seem to stop anyone in the industry for using it. In fact, in all of my years writing and editing, I have never — not once — seen a manuscript rejected or even criticized for including the two spaces that English prose requires after a period or colon.

I have, however, heard endless complaint from professional readers — myself included — about those second spaces being omitted. Care to guess why?

Reward yourself with a virtual candy cane if you said that cutting those spaces throws off word count estimation; the industry estimates assume those doubled spaces. And give yourself twelve reindeer if you also suggested that omitting them renders a manuscript harder to hand-edit.

We all know the lecture Millicent is likely to get if she forgets about that, right?

Again, a pro isn’t going to have to look very hard at a space-deprived page to catch on that there’s something fishy going on. Since Dickens was so fond of half-page sentences, the examples I’ve been using above won’t illustrate this point very well, so (reaching blindly into the depths of the bookshelf next to my computer), let’s take a random page out of Elizabeth Von Arnim’s VERA:

snapshot-2007-12-13-00-16-24.tiff

There are 310 words on this page; I wasn’t kidding the other day about how far off the standard word count estimations were, obviously. Now cast your eye over the same text improperly formatted:

snapshot-2007-12-13-00-18-09.tiff

Doesn’t look much different to the naked eye, does it? The word count is only slightly lower on this version of this page — 295 words — but enough to make quite a difference over the course of an entire manuscript.

So I see some hands shooting up out there? “But Anne,” I hear some sharp-eyed readers cry, “wasn’t the word count lower because there was an entire line missing from the second version?”

Well spotted, criers-out: the natural tendency of omitting the second spaces would be to include MORE words per page, not less. But not spacing properly between sentences was not the only deviation from standard format here; Millicent, I assure you, would have caught two others.I tossed a curve ball in here, to make sure you were reading as closely as she was.

Wild guesses? Anyone? Anyone?

The error that chopped the word count was a pretty innocent one, almost always done unconsciously: the writer did not turn off the widow/orphan control, found in Word under FORMAT/PARAGRAPH/LINE AND PAGE BREAKS. This insidious little function, the default unless one changes it, prevents single lines of multi-line paragraphs from getting stranded on either the bottom of one page of the top of the next.

As you may see, keeping this function operational results in an uneven number of lines per page. Which, over the course of an entire manuscript, is going to do some serious damage to the word count.

The other problem — and frankly, the one that would have irritated a contest judge far more, but probably Millicent slightly less — was on the last line of the page: using an emdash (“But—”) instead of a doubled dash. Here again, we see that the standards that apply to printed books are not proper for manuscripts.

Which brings me back to today’s moral: just because a particular piece of formatting looks right to those of us who have been reading books since we were three doesn’t mean that it is correct in a MANUSCRIPT. Millicent reads manuscripts all day; contest judges read entries for hours at a time. After a while, a formatting issue that might well not even catch a lay reader’s attention can begin to seem gargantuan.

As I pointed out yesterday, if the writing is good, it deserves to be free of distracting formatting choices. You want agents, editors, and contest judges to be muttering, “Wow, this is good,” over your manuscript, not “Oh, God, he doesn’t know the rules about dashes,” don’t you?

Spare Millicent the chagrin, please; both you and she will be the happier for it. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 8 Comments on SIOA, Part V: combating the “Oh, God — have I blown it?” blues

SIOA, Part V: combating the “Oh, God — have I blown it?” blues

Earlier this week, I told you the story of SIOA-avoider Zack, who had talked himself into a fairly common agent-soliciting writer’s dilemma. He had pitched successfully — so much so that he had been asked to send both the first 50 and the whole manuscript, respectively, to a number of different agents — but he had become so intent upon revising the book that he never quite managed to get any of those requested materials packets out the door.

Not that he intended not to send them out when he was pitching — no, at the time, and even for a few weeks after, he was willing and even eager to place his work under as many agents’ noses as possible. He certainly stressed out often enough about it. But somehow, he kept delaying making those last crucial changes.

And one day, he woke up to realize that five months had gone by. Or seven. Or a year.

It may have been as little as four weeks, but regardless of the actual number of cast-off calendar pages involved, it was long enough to prompt that thought always so close to the front of a writer gearing up for submission’s mind:

“Oh, God, have I blown my big chance?”

From that cri de coeur, it was only a small step to talking himself into believing that the agents in question would be miffed over the delay, so his submission really didn’t have a chance, anyway. Why, he reasoned, waste postage, now that rejection was a foregone conclusion?

For one very, very good reason, Zack: it wasn’t.

What doomed the submission was not anything that happened on the agent’s end; what guaranteed failure was not pulling out of the SIOA-avoidance spiral. There are, of course, plenty of things a submitter can do to render rejection more LIKELY, but at the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, the only manuscript that has absolutely no chance of being picked up by an agent is one that no agent ever sees.

So today I’m going to ask the question the Zacks of the world should be asking themselves: what precisely do you have to lose by sending it out at this point?

And yes, that’s a perfectly serious question.

Admittedly, I wouldn’t ADVISE waiting 7 or 8 months to submit requested materials (or pushing it for longer than a year, regardless of the reason), but it’s not as though Millicent the screener will take one look at the return address, consult a list of expected arrivals, and toss it aside unread, muttering, “Well, we’ll never know if THAT one had potential, will we?”

For one thing, handling it this way would require her to take the 14 seconds required to check a list — and for someone to have gone to the trouble of creating and maintaining such a list. Ripping open an envelope marked REQUESTED MATERIALS and starting to read is, when multiplied by a hundred manuscripts.

So if Zack’s long-delayed manuscript falls into her hands, Millicent probably just going to — you guessed it — rip open the envelope and start reading. Oh, she will probably roll her eyes at the line in his cover letter that mentions at which conference her boss requested the enclosed pages, but in all likelihood, she’s going to take a gander at the first page, at least.

PLEASE do not, however, regard that likelihood as carte blanche to push off revising that requested material until some future point when you’ll have unbroken time to revise. Some agents do take umbrage at long delays, particularly after face-to-face pitching.

You can see their point, can’t you? Listening to many pitches in a row is pretty exhausting, after all, and one of the first reactions someone who makes her living by selling books is likely to have to the pitch that truly excited her is to start brainstorming quietly about which editors might be interested in the book in question. Don’t you want to keep that train of thought going — or at least (hold on, racking my brains for a train metaphor here) place your good writing under her nose while that moment of excitement is still within living memory?

(Couldn’t come up with an appropriate follow-up railroad metaphor, obviously.)

If you want to build upon the excitement generated by a pitch or query letter, it’s prudent to try to get it out the door within 6 weeks of the request (not counting standard publishing not-at-home periods, like the three weeks leading up to Labor Day). The common wisdom dictates 3, but since agents hear SO many pitches at conferences and Millicent sees SO many queries, it’s unlikely that either is going to recall details of a pitch or query.

It IS nice, though, if you can get it to ‘em soon enough so SOMETHING about your project seems at least vaguely familiar. More than that isn’t necessary, strictly speaking, because you will have written REQUESTED MATERIALS in big, fat marker on the outside of the envelope and reminded them in the first line of your cover letter that they did, in fact, ask to see it. (If anything in the last sentence came as a surprise to you, I would highly recommend taking a gander at the SUBMISSION PACKET category at right.)

Less than 6 weeks is ideal, but if you can send it out in under 3 months, there really is no need to apologize for the delay. (As writers often do, and at great length.) Longer than that, though, and it’s a good idea to add a sentence to your cover letter, apologizing for the delay.

What you do NOT need to do is query again and ask for permission to send it at all. A crisp, businesslike cover letter set on top of your requested materials will do beautifully. Something along the lines of this is ample:

Dear (Requesting Agent’s Name),

Thank you for asking to see the first fifty pages of my novel, INVISIBLE INK. Please find it enclosed, along with a SASE for its safe return.

I had hoped to get these pages to you a trifle sooner, but the confluence of an unusually protracted work crisis and a bright idea for improving Chapter Two rendered my proofreading eye a bit slower than usual. I apologize for the delay.

Thank you for considering this, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

Charlotte Brontë

Nice, clean, professional — and most importantly, not maudlin. No need to go on at length about what actually delayed you; you’re just being polite here, not filling in a long-lost buddy about the last six months of your life. (If you don’t like the work crisis line, try a computer meltdown: everyone can identify with that.) All you really need to do here is to establish that you realize that you may have been slow to SIOA, and that you don’t plan to make a habit of it.

If you DO plan on making a habit of it, you can buy yourself some additional time if you are polite about any anticipated delays early on. Naturally, if you experience a genuine life crisis, that’s beyond your control — and if one occurs within the first couple of months after a request, it is perfectly proper to send out a courteous (and BRIEF) e-mail or letter to the requesting agent, stating that there’s going to be an unavoidable delay in sending those pages he asked to see.

Do everything in your power, though, to keep the lapse between request and submission under a year, especially for a follow-up on a conference pitch. (Since conferences are annual, and agencies frequently send different agents in different years, it can be really, really obvious if a submitter’s cover letter refers to the 2007 or 2008 conference.)

One more piece of practical advice: if you are SIOAing after a substantial delay, I would HIGHLY recommend submitting your work via mail, rather than as an e-mail attachment. Yes, even if the agent or editor originally suggested that you send it via e-mail.

Why? Because while Millicent will almost certainly open even a months-late envelope, she may not open a months-late attachment. Most agencies will not open unrequested e-mail attachments, anyway, due to fear of viruses, and the chances of your submission’s being mistaken for unsolicited grows as your name recognition at the agency fades.

If, knowing all this, you still find yourself firmly in the do-not-send-it-out-until-Groundhog-Day camp, I have one last question for you: are you positive that you really want to submit this book at all?

That may sound flippant, but listen: chronic SIOA-avoidance is a extremely common phenomenon, but in my experience, its severity does not correlate with how ready the book in question is to be marketed or the inherent talent of its writer. It’s very frequently a manifestation of fear of rejection, a way to protect one’s baby from criticism.

And that’s completely understandable, right? A manuscript that is never submitted cannot be rejected. It’s logically impossible.

So for many aspiring writers, it just feels more comfortable to cut the process short by not mailing requested materials — in essence, rejecting their own work before the agent can do it — than to take the risk of exposing their books to professional critique. That way, they can never learn for sure whether their books are marketable or not.

Let me be clear here: I have absolutely nothing negative to say about writers who create solely for their own pleasure. Bless the Emily Dickinsons of this world, I say, who limit their audience to people they already know. This can be wonderfully fulfilling, if the writer is honest about it, embracing the desire for an intimate readership — and doesn’t torture herself by continually trying to find an agent and/or editor she doesn’t really want or need.

However, the VAST majority of writers write in order to be read by people they DON’T know. To do that necessarily means risking rejection.

And let’s not kid ourselves about the kind of personal strength taking that level of risk requires: you have to be damned brave to send your work out to hyper-critical strangers. Let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of professions where the practitioner’s FIRST official act is to take a piece of her soul and allow people a couple of time zones away to examine it under a microscope for minute flaws.

So, just for today, let’s celebrate how courageous we are when we do send out our work, rather than castigating ourselves when we don’t. Just for today, let’s clap our hands for all of us who have taken the great leap of submission. And for those who are going to pluck up the courage to break the SIOA spiral now.

Chins up, my friends, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 17 Comments on Book marketing 101: a professional-looking title page, part III

Book marketing 101: a professional-looking title page, part III

Well, so much for predicting how tired I would be: the very day after I said I didn’t want to abandon you all in mid-title page, I found myself too wiped out to do my promised next post on title pages. Mea culpa — but I think I shall be taking the next few days off from posting, until I figure out how to integrate it with the masses of sleep I seem to need at the moment.

Let me move on to the second style of title page quickly, though, while I am fresh from a nap.

Last time, I mentioned that there were two formats commonly used in professional title pages. The one I showed you last time, what I like to call the Me First, is actually rather more common in submissions to agents than submissions from agents to editors, but it is certainly acceptable.

While the Me First format is perfectly fine, the other standard format, which I like to call the Ultra-professional, more closely replicates what most agents want their authors’ ultimate manuscript title pages to look like. Take a gander:

snapshot-of-ultra-pro-title.tiff

Elegant, isn’t it? And yet very market-oriented, because all of the requisite information is so very easy to find. Here is a downloadable version of the same, for those of you who would prefer to have it on hand.

I probably don’t need to walk through how to construct this little gem, but as my long-term readers know, I’m a great believer in making directions as straightforward as possible. I like them to be easy to follow in the ten minutes after an agent has said, “My God, I love your premise! Provide me with the manuscript instantly!” Call me zany, but on that happy day, I suspect that you’re going to have a lot on your mind.

So here’s how to put this little gem together. Set up a page with the usual standard format for manuscripts defaults — 1-inch margins all around, 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier — then type in the upper right-hand corner:

Book category (If you’re unclear on what this is, are tempted to vacillate between several, or resent having to categorize your complex book at all, believe me, I sympathize — but please see the BOOK CATEGORIES category at right with all possible speed.)

Estimated word count (If you’re unclear on the hows and whys of estimation, please see the WORD COUNT category at right.)

Skip down 12 lines, then add, centered on the page:
Your title
(Skip a line)
By
(Skip a line)
Your name (or your nom de plume)

Skip down 12 more lines, then add in the lower right corner:

Your real name
Line 1 of your address
Line 2 of your address
Your telephone number
Your e-mail address

As you may see from the example, it looks nifty if the information in the top section and the information in the bottom one share the same left margin. Since some addresses are longer than others, using this format results in that left margin’s being set at different points on the page for different manuscripts. While Flaubert’s address is short, Edith Wharton’s is not, producing a cosmetically altered title page:

snapshot-edith-wharton-title.tiff

Again, there should be NO other information on the title page, just lots and lots of pretty, pretty white space. After you sign with an agency, your agent’s contact information will appear where your contact information does.

That’s it, my friends – the two primary options you have, if you want your title page to look like the bigwigs’ do. And believe me, you do. Try formatting yours accordingly, and see if your work is not treated with greater respect!

After my last post, forward-thinking reader Christa anticipated my next point, so I have already covered the issue of whether you should include a title page in an e-mailed submission. Since the comments are less easily searched than the text of my posts, I’m going to go over the logic a bit here as well.

The answer, in case you were wondering, is yes — it is an excellent idea to include a title page with an e-submission. It’s an even better idea to include it as PART of the manuscript attachment, rather than as a separate attachment.

A bit perplexed? You’re not alone. Let me deal with the whys first, then the hows.

As Christa rightly points out, an agent who sends you an e-mail to ask for a full or partial manuscript, like one who calls after reading your first 50 pages to ask for the rest of the book, obviously has your contact information already. So why repeat it by sending a title page?

The first reason — and not the least significant, in an industry that values uniformity of format — is that every professional title page includes this information. It’s what agents and editors expect to see, and believe me, any agent who accepts e-queries receives enough e-mail in a day to render the prospect of scrolling through those received a few weeks ago a Herculean task. Make it easy for her to contact you, and she’s more likely to do it.

Second, even if the agent or screener scrupulously noted all of your contact information from your query AND filed away your e-mail address for future reference, agencies are very busy places. Haven’t you ever accidentally deleted an e-mail you intended to save?

I tremble to mention this, but most of the agents of my acquaintance who’ve been in the game for a while have at least one horror story about reading a terrific piece of writing, jumping up to show it to someone else in the office — and when they’ve returned, not being able to find the mystery author’s contact information.

Don’t let them tell a story like this about you: Millicent is unlikely to scroll through 700 e-mails to track down even the most captivating author’s contact information. And even if an agent asks for an e-mailed submission, he will not necessarily read all of it on screen — once it’s printed out, it’s as far from the e-mail that sent it as if it had come by regular mail.

Besides, do you really want to begin your relationship with the agent of your dreams (or editor of your passions) by deviating from standard format, even virtually? As every successful civil disobedient knows, you are generally better off politely meeting expectations in matters of little moment, so you may save your deviations for the things that really matter.

As Flaubert famously advised writers, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Okay, so he wasn’t talking about title pages. But the same principle applies here: a title page — or lack thereof — does make a strong statement about the professionalism of the manuscript, regardless of context.

I wouldn’t advise sending the title page as a separate attachment, though: because viruses can be spread through attachments, folks in the industry tend not to open attachments they did not specifically ask to see. Instead, insert the title page at the beginning of your manuscript file.

Do I see a raised hand or twelve out there? “But Anne,” I hear some quick-on-the-draw readers cry, “won’t including it in the document make the title page look wrong? Won’t it automatically have a slug line, and won’t including it mess up my pagination?”

Good questions, all, but these outcomes are relatively easy to avoid in Word. To prevent a slug line’s appearing on the title page, insert the title page into the document, then go to the Format menu and select Document, then Layout. There should be an option there called “Different First Page.” If you select that, you can enter a different header and footer for the first page of the document, without disturbing the slug line you will want to appear on every other page.

Don’t include a slug line (AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/TITLE/#) on the title page, or a page number. Just leave the header and footer blank.

To ensure that the first page of text (which will be page 2 of the document, right?) is numbered as page 1, you will need to designate the title page as 0. In Word, you do this by going to the View menu, selecting Header and Footer, then Page Number Format.

While I’m on the subject of formatting, and now that I know how to insert snapshots of pages into this blog, I think that next time, I shall take reader Dave’s excellent suggestion and show you what a page of text in standard format looks like. I have long been yearning to show how to format the first page of a chapter correctly.

And that’s the kind of longing I have when I’m NOT feverish; there’s no accounting for taste, eh? Speaking of which, my couch is calling me again, so I am signing off for today. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: the SASE and the politics of recycling

Book marketing 101: the SASE and the politics of recycling

Yesterday, I started to answer a very logical question: why, in these days of growing environmental awareness, is the writer expected to send a SASE (that’s stamped, self-addressed envelope to the rest of the population) in anticipation of a rejected manuscript’s return?

As a writer, freelance editor, and writing teacher, I hear permutations of this question all the time. “I understand why I need to include a SASE for a query,” aspiring authors tell me, “but do I really need it for the submission? It’s not as though I’m going to be able to reuse the manuscript after it’s passed through the mail twice, anyway. Can’t I just ask them to recycle it instead?”

In a word, no. In several words, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO!

Yesterday, I explained the history behind the SASE: part of its original purpose was not just to save agencies the cost of postage, but also to render submissions cheaper for the writer. It was also intended to preserve copyright by allowing the author ostensible control about whose grimy paws were on the manuscript when.

Writers tend to forget this in the cyber age, when huge chunks of writing can be transferred from one end of the planet to the other with the simple push of a button (yes, of course I know that the world is not as flat as that image implies. Don’t stop me now; I’m on a roll), but technically, in order to retain copyright over your own writing, you need to control where and when it is read by others. Writing a post on this blog, for instance, is under my control, since I dictate where people can view it; I could disable RSS feeds, if I wanted. (Oh, the power! The power!) If I sent the same posts out via e-mail, they could end up anywhere, forwarded far beyond my knowledge.

When you send uncopyrighted material off to an agency or publishing house — to a credible one, anyway — you and your readers there are both operating on the tacit assumption that they will not reproduce your work without your permission. You are not, in effect, authorizing them to show it to anyone else until you sign a contract that explicitly grants them the right to do so.

When you send a SASE, you are implicitly asserting your right to control where your work is sent next. It conveys an 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.

As I believe I have mentioned before, this is a tradition-bound industry; it has historically been slow to change. No matter how good the logic against some of its long-held norms, this one did not change at all until there were some very tangible benefits on the agents’ end to altering it.

For example, the anthrax scare convinced some agencies to accept e-mailed queries and submissions. And the post 9/11 requirement to tote heavy packages to the post office prompted some agencies to start recycling rejected manuscripts, rather than having the lowest intern on the totem pole — the one who aspires to Millicent’s job someday — wheel a paper-loaded dolly up out of the building.

But practice, most agencies still adhere to the old norms. Don’t believe me? Thumb through any of the standard agency guides, and count how many agencies mention that they recycle.

Like so many other aspects of the querying and submission process, at one time, the use of the SASE carried greater benefits to the writer than it does now, but time has hardened courtesies into demands, and habits into traditions. Today, if you do not include a SASE with your submission, you are perceived to be thumbing your nose at the traditions of people you are trying to impress.

As satisfying as that may be, it’s not the best way to convince an agent of your Socratic intellect and lamb-like willingness to take direction.

So while my long-standing affection for writers, trees, and the printed pages both work to produce would LOVE to be able to say dispense with the SASE for the manuscript’s return in favor of a simple #10 envelope, it would not be in your best interest to fling away the old norms.

The only alternative that I have seen work in practice is to include a line in the cover letter, POLITELY asking the agency to recycle the manuscript if they decide not to offer representation and mentioning the business-sized SASE enclosed for their reply. Do be aware, however, that this strategy sometimes backfires with screeners trained to check first for a manuscript-sized SASE: it’s not unheard-of for the Millicents of the world to toss aside such a manuscript to be tossed aside without reading the cover letter.

As I believe I may have mentioned before, I don’t make the rules; I only comment upon them. Let’s all pray that when Millicent does engage in summary rejection, she flings that precious ream of paper into a recycling bin.

Knowing the likelihood of that happening, I feel as though I should go off and plant a tree now. Keep sending in those great questions, and keep up the good work!

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Respect the cheese plate!

Super Reader Toddie wrote in the other day with an excellent question:

“Anne – Do you have any words of wisdom/nice template for the follow-up letter/email itself, when we get the temerity to send it? I waffle as to how much to include in order to stay on the good side of the agent vs. being seen as a nasty pest/provoking an automatic rejection.”

Toddie, thanks for asking this as a follow-up to my dictum on follow-ups: until an agency has had your submission — that’s requested manuscript pages, people, not a query letter — for EITHER 8 weeks (not including the 3-week industry summer vacation) OR half again as long as the agent told you to expect (if the agent told you 6 weeks, give it 9 before you follow up), you may legitimately inquire about it without being a pest. Indeed, you SHOULD inquire about it then, because if you wait much longer, the chances of being able to find it again if it is lost are slim.

Note that I said SUBMISSION, and not query letter. If you haven’t heard back on a query letter in 8 weeks AND you sent a SASE with it, just assume that it was lost. Send another, and don’t bother to mention that you’ve queried before. At worst, you’ll get a peevish little note from a screener, saying he already remembers it, but most of the time, it will simply be read as a fresh query. Screeners’ memories are not that good, and often the bodies screening queries in the summer are not the same ones screening them at the same agency in the winter.

But okay, let’s say that you have been waiting for 8 weeks to hear back on requested materials. Or an agency sent you back your manuscript with no letter attached, or you received your SASE with neither letter nor manuscript in it, or you received a rejection letter clearly intended for someone else’s manuscript (and yes, I’ve seen all of these happen. Agencies move a LOT of paper in any given week). Any of these warrants a follow-up note — and if you received someone else’s materials, you should send them back to the agency right away along with that note, because some poor writer is waiting for those.

Do send a note or an e-mail, rather than calling. Why? Well, if any of the outcomes I have mentioned above is true, you’re going to be letting the agent know that someone at the agency has fallen down on the job. At best, the agent will be annoyed at her screener and apologetic toward you; at worst, the agent will resent the implication that she should be working faster. And in every case, yours will be the ring of the phone that does not herald an offer from a publisher for one of her clients’ books.

So tell me: do you really want to be on the initiating end of that call?

Generally speaking, it’s not in your best interest to call anyone in the industry with whom you do not already have a relationship — and no, a nice conversation at a conference does NOT count, by publishing world standards. This is a fairly formal industry, still run by the written word. So it’s best to be as polite as possible — adhere to the Cheese Plate Rule.

What? Don’t tell me that no one ever explained the etiquette of cheese consumption to you. Really? No one but me was raised regretting the Bourbons? What is the world coming to?

Okay, then, I’ll explain: after the dessert course, the hostess presents the guests with an array of cheeses and small knives, right, so that each guest may serve herself? But each cheese is a different shape – an isosceles triangle of Brie, perhaps, next to a rectangle of triple crème, a square of sage Derby, and a wee round of Stilton — so how do you know how to cut off your individual slice?

By preserving the integrity of the cheese: you cut off your piece so as to allow the cheese from which you slice it to remain essentially the same shape as before you began. Thus, you would cut along one long leg of the triangle for the Brie, so the original remains a triangle, across the short way for the triple crème, a shave along the top of the Derby, a pie slice off the Stilton, etc. That way, when the other diners return for seconds, the cheeses will resemble their original shapes closely enough that each eager eater can hone in instantly upon her favorite from round one.

Curious how I’m going to tie this to agents, aren’t you?

Just as one should preserve the integrity of the cheese by conforming to its original shape, a polite writer should preserve the integrity of the budding relationship with an agent by responding via the medium through which the agent requested the materials. If you queried by regular mail, and you received a mailed request to send more materials, sending a follow-up via regular mail preserves the integrity of the relationship, labeling you as polite and considerate: you are letting the agent determine the extent of your intimacy.

In other words, just because you have an agent’s phone number or e-mail address doesn’t mean you should necessarily use it. Respect the cheese plate!

However, if you have already exchanged e-mail with an agent, it is entirely appropriate to follow up via e-mail. If the agent called you personally to ask to see the rest of the manuscript after you’d submitted the first 50 pages, you could legitimately phone – although personally, I would probably e-mail in this instance.

And no, Virginia, if you met the agent at a conference, you do not have to wait until next year’s conference to follow up (although I have known ultra-polite writers who have done so, actually, much to the surprise of the agents). Preserving the integrity of the cheese in this situation would require following up in the same manner as you submitted your materials: either by regular mail or by e-mail.

You’ll never look at cheese the same way again, I assure you.

So, back to Toddie’s question: what should you say? Well, I’m a big fan of allowing people who have messed up an easy means of saving face, so I would advise setting up a way that the agent can do what you want without having to accept any blame whatsoever for the delay. And heck, a little flattery never hurts, either. (Hey, these are touchy people.) So if an agent has had a submission for 8 weeks, I might send a letter that said:

“Dear Mr. X,
Thank you for asking to see the first fifty pages of my manuscript, THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL. Since eight weeks have passed since I sent it, I am beginning to fear that perhaps it got lost in the mail. Here are the pages you requested again, with another SASE. If you would not mind dropping the enclosed stamped, self-addressed postcard in the mail so that I know that this copy did indeed arrive intact, I would appreciate it.”

And I would send exactly the same pages again. Ditto if I received an empty SASE or somebody else’s manuscript — because, you see, with that many submissions, it actually is possible that the submission did get lost. In the more likely case that it did not, this letter allows the agency to pretend that it did.

And the submission is read by a contrite screener, rather than a defensive one. Everyone wins!

You will notice, I hope, that I have been speaking exclusively of agency submissions here, rather than of editors. If you have submitted to a small press, the method above is fine — although for your own protection, you should always send manuscripts to a press that accepts direct submissions from authors via a form of mail with a return receipt.

However, if you met a kind editor from a major house at a conference who asked to see your pages and have not heard back, no amount of cheese-paring is going to enable you to make the follow-up request sound polite. Because, you see, all of the major houses have policies that preclude their reviewing unagented submissions — which means that in asking to see your work, the editor was doing you a personal favor, by definition. So, technically, he doesn’t have an obligation to get back to you, alas.

Just let it go.

I should mention, for the sake of completeness, that the organizers of this year’s PNWA conference swore up and down that every single editor who attended was in fact empowered to pick up new authors directly. If that is true, and an editor you met there solicited your material, feel free to follow up. However, as none of the major publishing houses have changed their stated policies on the subject in recent months, I tend to doubt that such a follow-up would receive much of a response.

What you should NOT do, under any circumstances, with either an editor or an agent who has already sent back your work, is ask for insight on why. Any reasonably busy person in the industry simply reads too many manuscripts to remember individual ones a week or two after the fact, unfortunately, so this is universally considered an unreasonable request.

You are right to tread with care, Toddie: this is a notoriously easily-offended industry. But if you both follow the Cheese Plate Rule and make it as easy as humanly possible for the recipient of your follow-up request to read your work immediately, you are far more likely to be happy with the ultimate outcome.

Keep up the good work!

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What if they asked you to e-mail it?

Before I begin today’s post: yes, there is a problem with the website at the moment; for reasons that I am tempted to attribute to the sense of humor of a vengeful minor deity, the usual goodies at the right-hand side of the screen aren’t showing up at the moment. So while the links, categories of post, my bio, etc. are still there, technically, it’s not clear how a reader would access them.

Please be patient — we are scrambling around behind the scenes, trying to fix the problem. And to those of you who got a little panicky when my archives disappeared before: rest assured, they are not gone forever. Lots o’ backups.

On to today’s topic. I’ve received quite a few questions privately from writers who have had agents and editors respond to their queries or pitches with requests for e-mailed submissions, rather than paper copies. I have to say, in general, I do not think complying with this request is a good idea from the writer’s point of view, for a variety of reasons.

The first, and the most practical, is that it is MUCH easier to reject someone electronically: one push of a button, and the submission is deleted. This one reason that e-mailed queries are usually answered so quickly: the moment the agent’s eyes fall on something she dislikes, a few simple keystrokes guarantee that query is gone from her life forever.

The same principle, unfortunately, applies to e-mailed submissions.

The second reason — less of an issue with a well-established agency than a new one, but one still worth considering — is the copyright issue. Remember back on the 9th, when I was filling you in on the logic behind the SASE, how I explained that it is vital for a writer to keep control over where and how her work is available to be read? Well, with ANY e-mailed attachment (or any e-mail, for that matter), you have absolutely NO way of controlling, or even knowing, where your work will end up.

While it’s unlikely that the chapter you e-mail to an agent 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.

Again, part of the charm of electronic communication is its speed.

Also, it’s been my experience that people in the publishing industry like to pretend that it’s normal and sensible to place an entire book into a single Word document, as though that did not render the manuscript both infinitely harder to edit and significantly more likely to have technical problems. If a document is difficult to open, or there are computer incompatibility problems (especially likely if you are a Mac user or are running an operating system launched within this decade: I tremble to tell you how many agencies and publishing houses are still running Windows 98 on ten-year-old PCs), I can tell you with absolute assurance: YOU will be blamed.

Do you honestly want to begin your relationship with an agent as the writer whose attachment wouldn’t open? (Yes, I know; it’s unfair, but remember, it’s not as though the publishing world tends to employ in-house computer experts. A surprisingly high percentage of agents and editors have significant love-hate issues with their computers. Don’t stick your thumb in that sore spot.)

Then, too, whenever you send something as an attachment, it is too tempting not to proof it in hard copy before you send it, which can be disastrous. Admit it — you probably have in the past tried to edit e-mailed documents right on screen, when you were in a hurry. An odd illusion most of us have, that reading on screen is faster: actually, the typical reader who is concentrating on content reads 25% MORE SLOWLY on screen than on paper. You’re making your proofing job harder — and less efficient — by doing it this way.

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

Because it is empirically harder to read on a screen, 79% of on-screen readers scan the page, instead of reading word-for-word — which can have serious implications for your submission over and above proofreading. Ideally, you would like your dream agent to spend MORE time than average reading your sentences, not less, right?

The implication, of course, when an agent or editor asks a writer to e-mail a submission, is that it will be read faster than the same submission sent via regular mail. In my experience, this is usually not true; the submission merely goes into an electronic backlog, rather than a stack of papers. Or it gets forwarded to an assistant, to languish in HER backlog.

And realistically, now many people do you know who would read a 300-page book on screen? If they like the first few pages, they are going to print it out, anyway.

So what would I advise you do if an agent or editor asks you to e-mail your work? Personally, I will not e-mail any writing I intend to sell to anyone with whom I do not have a contractual relationship: agent, editor, editing client. I prefer to have an iron-clad guarantee that my writing is not going to go winging out into the world unbeknownst to me. In cases where there isn’t a pre-existing contractual relationship, I just say that I’m not comfortable sending the material electronically, but assure them it will be in the mail that day.

I have never yet had a soul object to this.

I know that a lot of aspiring writers are too nervous about alienating their potential agents to put their wee feet down on anything major. They want to make sure that they follow the agent or editor’s directions to the letter. If they’re asked for an attachment, they’re going to send an attachment, by gum.

If you fall into that careful category, I have a couple of suggestions. First, are you POSITIVE that the agent or editor DID ask you to e-mail the submission? After all, attachments are how viruses are typically spread. Or did you just make that assumption because the agent or editor responded by e-mail to your query?

Don’t laugh — it is very, very common for writers to send an e-mailed query, then mistake a “fine, send me the first 50 pages” for a direct order to e-mail those pages. However, unless the publishing professional asked SPECIFICALLY that you send your submission as an attachment, feel free to send your pages via regular mail. No excuses necessary.

Second, publishing is a very courtesy-based industry. Generally speaking, most agents and editors will respond well to a prompt, polite return e-mail where the writer explains that she would prefer to send the submission via regular mail. In most cases, they will not care one way or the other, but they will appreciate your consideration.

If the very idea of being that assertive shocks you, close your eyes for a moment and picture the agent or editor who has asked you for your submission. In your mental image, what is that person doing? Scanning the other 700 queries he received this week? Reading over the 20 other requested manuscripts already on his desk? Haggling on the phone, trying to sell a book for an already-signed client? Or is he drumming his fingertips on his barren desktop, muttering, “I asked for Susie Q’s first chapter a week ago. WHERE IS IT?”

Hint: if you said the latter, you may be worrying too much about offending this person.

Agents and editors are really, really busy people. Realistically, yours is almost certainly not the only manuscript any given editor requested at any given conference; yours is definitely not the only query that prompted the agency to ask for pages on the day yours made that agent smile. They receive, at minimum, dozens of packets of requested materials per week.

So what if yours takes an extra few days to get to them? Well, let’s just say that they’re not going to be wandering listlessly around their offices, waiting for your manuscript to show up. They will be keeping occupied, I assure you.

If, even knowing all this, you still find that you are not comfortable saying that you prefer to send your submission via regular mail, consider this: there is an excuse for sending it in hard copy instead that literally no one will question. Particularly someone who is not too computer-savvy.

And what are these magic words? “I’m sorry — my server has been acting funny lately. It’s been mangling attachments. Since I do not want you to have to hassle with it, I am going to send you the chapters you requested by regular mail.”

Simple, clean, unanswerable. And it works every bit as well as a response to an initial request for the first five pages as it does as to send a hard copy of the entire manuscript to an agent who has already seen the first chapter as an attachment.

Piece o’ proverbial cake. Keep up the good work!