Posted on - 7 Comments on Wrapping it all up, with or without the nice, big bow

Wrapping it all up, with or without the nice, big bow

My, I’ve been getting a lot of great questions in the comments lately! I hope that means that many of you are getting your work out there, sliding it under agents’, editors’, and contest judges’ noses. Yes, the news from the publishing world, like the news from other sectors of the economy, is rather grim, but that does not mean landing an agent or selling a book is impossible.

As I am undoubtedly not the first person in the writers’ cosmos to say, the only manuscript that has absolutely NO chance of getting published is the one that’s never sent out. Keep plugging away.

On the often-unrelated subjects of both good questions from readers and submitting one’s work with style, insightful long-time reader Jen wrote in to ask:

I can’t help but think that the rules sink into my brain a little deeper with each reading. Still, sending off all those pages with nothing to protect them but the slim embrace of a USPS envelope seems to leave them too exposed. Where does one purchase a manuscript box?

This is an excellent question, Jen: many, many aspiring writers worry that a simple Manila envelope, or even the heavier-duty Priority Mail envelope favored by the US Postal Service, will not preserve their precious pages in pristine condition. Especially, as is all too common, if those pages are crammed into an envelope or container too small to hold them comfortably, or that smashes the SASE into them so hard that it leaves an indelible imprint in the paper.

Do I sense some readers scratching their heads? “But Anne,” some of you ask, “once a submission is is tucked into an envelope and mailed, it is completely out of the writer’s control. Aren’t the Millicents who inhabit agencies, as well as the Maurys who screen submissions at publishing houses and their Aunt Mehitabels who judge contest entries, fully aware that pages that arrive bent were probably mangled in transit, not by the writer who sent them?”

Well, yes and no, head-scratchers. Yes, pretty much everyone who has ever received a mauled letter is cognizant of the fact that envelopes do occasionally get caught in sorting machines. Also, mail gets tossed around a fair amount in transit — you think all of those packages in Santa’s sleigh have a smooth ride? Think again — so even a beautifully put-together submission packet may arrive a tad crumpled.

Do most professional readers cut the submitter slack for this? Sometimes; as I’ve mentioned before, if Millicent’s just burned her lip on that latté that she never seems to remember to let cool, it’s not going to take much for the next submission she opens to annoy her. And in the case of contest entries, I don’t know Aunt Mehitabel personally, but I have heard contest judges over the years complain vociferously to one another about the state in which entries have arrived on their reading desks.

All of which is to say: appearances count. You should make an effort to get your submission to its intended recipient in as neat a state as possible.

How does one go about insuring that? The most straightforward way, as Jen suggests, is to ship it in a box designed for the purpose. Something, perhaps, along the lines of this:

Just kidding; we’re not looking for a medieval Bible box here. What most writers like to use looks a little something like this:

This is the modern manuscript box: sturdy white or brown corrugated cardboard with a lid that is attached along one long side. Usually, a manuscript box will hold from 250 to 750 pages of text comfortably, without sliding from side to side.

While manuscript boxes are indeed very nice, they aren’t necessary for submission; the attached lid, while undoubtedly aesthetically pleasing, is not required, or even much appreciated at the agency end. Manuscripts are taken out of the boxes for perusal, anyway, so why fret about how the boxes that send them open?

In practice, any clean, previously-unused box large enough to hold all of the requested materials (more on that subject in my next post) without crumpling them will work to send a submission.

Some of you are resisting the notion of using just any old box, aren’t you, rather than one specially constructed for the purpose? I’m not entirely surprised. I hear all the time from writers stressing out about what kind of box to use — over and above clean, sturdy, and appropriately-sized, that is — and not without good reason. In the old days — say, 30+ years ago — the author was expected to provide a box, and a rather nice one, then wrap it in plain brown paper for shipping. These old boxes are beautiful, if you can still find one: dignified black cardboard, held together by shining brass brads.

For sending a manuscript, though, there’s no need to pack it in anything extravagant: no agent is going to look down upon your submission because it arrives in an inexpensive box.

In fact, if you can get the requested materials there in one piece box-free — say, if it is an excerpt short enough to fit into a Manila folder or Priority Mail cardboard envelope without much wrinking — go ahead. Do bear in mind, though, that you want to have your pages arrive looking fresh and unbent, so make sure that your manuscript fits comfortably in its holder in such a way that the pages are unlikely to wrinkle.

Remember my comment during the Manuscript Formating 101 series about its being penny-wise and pound-foolish to use cheap paper for submissions? This is part of the reason why.

Look for a box with the right footprint to ship a manuscript without too much internal shifting. In general, it’s better to get a box that is a little too big than one that’s a little too small. To keep the manuscript from sliding around and getting crumpled, insert wads of bubble wrap or handfuls of peanuts around it, not wadded-up paper. Yes, the latter is more environmentally-friendly, but we’re talking about presentation here.

Avoid the temptation to use newspaper, too; newsprint stains.

Most office supply stores carry perfectly serviceable white boxes — Office Depot, for instance, stocks a perfectly serviceable recycled cardboard variety — but if you live in the greater Seattle area, funky plastic junk store Archie McPhee’s, of all places, routinely carries fabulous red and blue boxes exactly the right size for a 450-page manuscript WITH adorable little black plastic handles for about a buck each. My agent gets a kick out of ‘em, reportedly, and while you’re picking one up, you can also snag a bobble-head Edgar Allan Poe doll that bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to Robert Goulet:

If that’s not one-stop holiday shopping, I should like to know what is.

Your local post office will probably stock manuscript-sized boxes as well, as does USPS online. Post offices often conceal some surprisingly inexpensive options behind those counters, so it is worth inquiring if you don’t see what you need on display.

Do be warned, though, that the USPS’ 8 1/2″ x 11″ boxes only LOOK as though they will fit a manuscript comfortably without bunching the pages. the actual footprint of the bottom of the box is the size of a piece of paper, so there is no wiggle room to, say, insert a stack of paper without wrinkling it.

Trust me, that’s NOT something you want to find out after you’ve already printed out your submission.

Yes, yes, I know: the USPS is purportedly the best postal service in the world, a boon to humanity, and one of the least expensive to boot. Their gallant carriers have been known to push forward through the proverbial sleet, hail, dark of night, and mean dogs. But when faced with an only apparently manuscript-ready box on a last-minute deadline, the thought must occur to even the most flag-proud: do the postal services of other countries confound their citizens in this way?

What do they expect anyone to put in an 8 1/2″ x 11″ box OTHER than a manuscript? A Christmas wreath? A pony? A small automobile?

Far and away the most economical box source for US-based writers are those free all-you-can-stuff-in-it Priority Mail boxes that the post office provides:

Quite the sexy photo, isn’t it, considering that it’s of an object made of cardboard? Ravishing. If you don’t happen to mind all of the postal service propaganda printed all over it, these 12″ x 12″ x 5 1/2″ boxes work beautifully, with a little padding.

Say away from those wadded-up newspapers, I tell you.

While I’m on the subject of large boxes, if you’ve been asked to send more than one copy of a manuscript — not all that uncommon after you’ve been picked up by an agent — don’t even try to find a box that opens like a book: just use a standard shipping box. Insert a piece of colored paper between each copy, to render the copies easy to separate. Just make sure it’s not construction paper, or the color will rub off on your lovely manuscripts.

Whatever difficulties you may have finding an appropriately-sized box, DO NOT, under any circumstances, reuse a box clearly marked for some other purpose, such as holding dishwashing soap. As desirable as it might be for your pocketbook, your schedule, and the planet, never send your manuscript in a box that has already been used for another purpose.

You know what I mean, don’t you? We’ve all received (or sent) that box that began life as an mail-order shipping container, but is now covered with thick black marker, crossing out the original emporium’s name. My mother takes this process even farther, turning the lines intended to obfuscating that Amazon logo into little drawings of small creatures cavorting on a cardboard-and-ink landscape.

As dandy as this recycling is for birthday presents and the like, it’s considered a bit tacky in shipping a submission. Which is unfortunate, as the ones from Amazon tend to be a perfect footprint for manuscripts. Don’t yield to the temptation, though.

“But wait!” I hear the box-savvy cry, “those Amazon boxes are about 4 inches high, and my manuscript is about 3 inches high. It just cries out, ‘Stuff your manuscript into me and send me to an agent!’”

A word of advice: don’t take advice from cardboard boxes; they are not noted for their brilliance. Spring for something new.

And you do know that every time you send requested materials, you should write REQUESTED MATERIALS in great big letters in the lower left-hand corner of the submission envelope, don’t you? (If you have been asked to submit electronically, include the words REQUESTED MATERIALS in the subject line of the e-mail.) This will help your submission to land on the right desk, instead of in the slush pile or recycling bin.

Next time, I shall talk a little more about what goes INSIDE that manuscript box and in what order. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The Glamour of the Book Tour, Part II, by Michael Schein, author of Just Deceits

The Glamour of the Book Tour, Part II, by Michael Schein, author of Just Deceits

Hello, campers –

Welcome back to Part II of your treat for having made it all the way through the Manuscript Formatting 101 series: a first-hand account from a FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) of a book tour by a recently-published author. Bookmark these posts, because someday you’ll need them.

Don’t quibble about when someday will come. Whenever it does come, you’ll want to be ready, won’t you?

Yesterday, FAAB Michael Schein, author of the recently-released JUST DECEITS gave us a humorous peek into the hectic world of being one’s own publicist, as well as some very valuable tips on how to set up book readings. (In response to that great gasp I just heard from those of you who missed yesterday’s post, no, Virginia, one’s publisher doesn’t always set those up for one. Increasingly, it’s up to the authors of books released by major publishing houses, just as it’s always been to self-published authors, to schedule public readings.)

Today, Michael is being kind enough to share his experience of what happens after an author gets to such a reading, as well as insights on how to cajole attendees into actually shelling out the dosh for a copy.

Speaking of which, I would be remiss to my duty to a fellow author if I did not add: if you happen to have a mystery lover or two on your holiday shopping list, here is a brief description of JUST DECEITS to whet your gift-giving (and reading) appetite:

In 1793, the most powerful family in Virginia found itself embroiled in scandal: Richard Randolph and his sister-in-law, the beautiful and impetuous Nancy Randolph, were charged with adultery and infanticide. Based on actual events, Just Deceits tells the story of the Trial of the Century – the 18th Century – as the remarkable defense team of wily Patrick Henry and ambitious John Marshall battled each other, their clients, family intrigue, the prosecution, and the truth itself, trying to save their clients from the gallows. In its ribald portrayal of a young legal system already driven more by spectacle than evidence, Just Deceits calls into question the feasibility — and even the desirability — of uncovering “the whole truth.” Ultimately, in the secrets revealed and the relationships celebrated, Just Deceits is as much a story of a trial of love as the trial in the courtroom.

You may buy JUST DECEITS directly from Michael’s website, from his publisher, if you’re in the mood to spread the Christmas spirit to an independent press, or on Amazon. If you’d like to buy it from him in person, here’s a link to his tour schedule.

Why do I so often list several venues for buying my guest bloggers’ work? Knowing how publishing works, mostly: in case you weren’t already aware of it, these days, the author’s royalty rate varies by where a book is sold. Typically, that rate is highest through the author’s or publisher’s website and lowest at discount clearinghouses like overstock.com. (Yes, you read that correctly: much of the discount offered by discount venues comes out of the author’s pocket.)

Once again, please join me in welcoming Michael Schein. Pay close attention, think good thoughts about your own future book tours, and keep up the good work!

How to sell a book, one at a time. OK – it’s the day of the book signing! I just had the first one of my tour today (11/18). It was my fifth overall. I sold 13 books today on a quiet Tuesday evening (in three hours), and the Barnes & Noble manager said that as signings go, that’s a success.

I certainly think so – I feel quite good about it. I’m being read by people from various parts of the country, including (aside from Washington State, where I live) Virginia, Missouri, Minnesota, Texas, West Virginia, Alabama and New Jersey. If they like it, they’ll probably tell their friends and family – because I asked them to.

Making contact with your future readers. If you aren’t John Grisham, the first and most important thing about a book signing is to get your butt up out of the chair.

The only time to sit in the lovely chair the bookstore will provide (it’s a leather throne at Seattle Mystery Bookshop) is while actually signing the book you just sold. Then get up and shake your new reader’s hand as you return the book to him/her. That won’t make up for a crappy book, but it will make your new reader want to like your book, which doesn’t hurt.

Second, don’t wait for people to approach you – they won’t. Don’t stalk them, but greet them as they walk by, and ask, “May I tell you about my new novel?” or something to that effect.

It takes a hard heart or a big hurry to answer “no” to that one.

Your pitch – the same one that sold the book – comes next. Every time you say it, say it like it is the first time (but without the stuttering). In other words, this is conversation, not telemarketing.

Show the customer the back cover – the one with the great blurbs. Hand it to them. Put the product in their hands.

Yes, it’s a “product.”

Ask a question: “Are you interested in history?” (for historical fiction) “Where are you from?” “Have you ever dreamed of traveling to Africa?” (for a book involving Africa).

You’ll get used to it – again, this is simply conversation. Don’t do all the talking. Listen.

Once you’ve engaged a person in conversation, you’ve probably got a sale. But you still need to close the deal.

The correct way to close a book deal is not, “Would you please buy my book?” It is “May I sign that for you?” “Shall I personalize it?”

Once signed and personalized, it is sold.

Pretty scary, huh? Look, we can be artists on our own time. When we are in the bookstore, our job is to sell books. If you need motivation beyond the royalties, remember this – that new masterpiece taking shape in your hard drive is unlikely to see the light of day if your current book flops.

Nov. 19. More pitfalls on the road. All the above sounds rational, right? Forget rational. The world is not what it seems. Or, worse yet, maybe it is.

On Nov. 19th I found that the Richmond stop I’d sweated blood over was a small house off the main road on the edge of a small shopping district where there’s no foot traffic. True, the owner was kind and interesting, the shop was crammed to bursting with an eclectic assortment of books, and it had been in business somehow for 28 years, but still, it was dead. It had never been my first choice, but writers can’t be choosers: it was an independent non-Christian bookstore and therefore something special in post-apocalyptic America.

Despite marketing through their email list and by postcards to local lawyers, the only two people who showed up were my brother-in-law, and the woman who owns the B&B where I’m staying. I could have sold to them directly, and made more on each sale.

No one else even entered the shop from 7 pm to 8:20 pm, when I gave up. Then I did what you cannot do if you are to make a profit – I bought an expensive book. It is hard to sit in a bookstore for over an hour with nothing to do, and not buy a book or two.

This is so glamorous!

What do you mean, the books aren’t here yet? My publisher was supposed to ship two cases of books, and I needed them for my 11/20 appearance at the John Marshall House, since they hadn’t ordered books directly. I’d made arrangements with Anna, the B&B proprietor, to ship books to her, so I was disappointed to find when I arrived the night of 11/18 the books were not yet here. Nor did they arrive on Nov. 19.

Finally, I got the tracking numbers from my publisher – and sure enough, they had arrived on Nov. 17th, and been signed for by Anna! It was too late to ask her again, but I sent an urgent email, and then didn’t sleep well all night, thinking they’d been stolen.

The story emerged the next day. Anna (an otherwise very capable woman) had hosted another writer the previous weekend (see, I told you last time that we’re thick as flies), and had arranged with his publisher to take a shipment. She’d forgotten about the same arrangement with me, so when the books arrived, she assumed they were his, and had his sponsor pick them up for shipment to his next stop – New Hampshire!

My books were on their way to a general store in the Granite State and my signing in Richmond was in three hours.

Frantic calls, texts, and imprecations to the ghost of Jack Randolph, who I’d insulted the previous day during my visit to Hollywood Cemetery, resulted in a rescue worthy of Lassie, as my books were snatched off the loading dock with all the shipping labels affixed, and somehow returned to me.

I sold twenty (count ‘em – twenty!) books today (11/20). I almost had none to sell.

And so, to end this tale of woe and wonder, this life of ours is never boring as soon as we step off the edge, and call ourselves writers.

Happy touring, fellow fools!

Posted on - 2 Comments on The Glamour of the Book Tour, by Michael Schein, author of Just Deceits

The Glamour of the Book Tour, by Michael Schein, author of Just Deceits

Hello again, campers –

Remember how I promised a few days ago to give you a treat for working so hard throughout the Manuscript Formatting 101 series? (Yes, I honestly do know it’s no fun for anyone concerned. Things that are good for one often aren’t.) Well, today is Treat Day — and I’m delighted to report that tomorrow will be as well.

Don’t you feel virtuous now? Doubly so?

I’m excessively pleased about this particular treat, because it’s not something I’ve been able to finagle for all of you here at Author! Author! before: a first-hand account from a FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) of what it’s like to be on a book tour by a recently-published author.

Yes, really. Pinch me, somebody.

To make this treat better yet, FAAB Michael Schein, author of the recently-released JUST DECEITS is not only going to share his on-the-road experiences with us, but also give us some tips on how to set up public readings, attract potential book buyers to them, and sell copies of one’s book once they’re there.

I told you it was going to be a good treat.

So please join me in welcoming Michael Schein; take good notes, because you are going to be deeply grateful for his insight someday. If you’d like to see him in action at one of his own book signings, here’s a link to his tour schedule.

Keep up the good work, and take it away, Michael!

November 17. 12:59 Eastern Time. 24,997 feet. Descending into Atlanta. Turbulence. Welcome to the book tour for Just Deceits: A Historical Courtroom Mystery (Bennett & Hastings 2008). I’m Michael Schein, author, publicist and traveling salesman, and I’ll be your host. Let’s talk about that particular aspect of book promotion known and romanticized in many Hollywood films and in the fertile imagination of the unpublished writer as the book tour.

Let me begin by saying that I am grateful to be at this point in my life, in which I have a trade paperback published by a small Seattle press, and I have the freedom and frequent flyer miles (“earned” by charging too much on my VISA) to be able to go out and peddle my book.

Between that paragraph and this one much has happened! I wrote that in Atlanta while awaiting my flight to Norfolk. We took off, but the plane seemed to falter on its ascent. It was quiet and creepy. We turned. We lost a little altitude. We turned some more. We heard engines, but they were too quiet. We heard nothing from the flight attendants, who remained buckled in and stone-faced. We were about three to five thousand feet up – the trees and houses were still clearly distinguishable. Finally, we were told we were returning to Atlanta due to a little problem but not to worry, the engines were working fine.

OK, great, what else keeps a plane up? Wings? Rudder? Flaps? God? who never hears from me except to curse and write atheistic poetry?

A minute can be a long time.

We were up for about twenty to thirty of them. But the fact that I’m writing this tips off the happy ending. Yes, a safe landing. Turns out the throttle lever got stuck – that’s not good, is it? No matter how well the engines are functioning, without fuel their proper function is to shut down! Anyway, our crack pilots got it unstuck.

To make a long story short, we changed planes, and got to sit on a new plane without ventilation for an hour while we waited for the crew, plus another hour while we waited for soft drinks.

There’s logic: delay a one hour seven minute flight (airtime) one hour to be sure you can serve the thirsty cranky denizens a Pepsi which the few who actually drink that treacly syrup would have been able to purchase at their destination just as quickly.

But I wasn’t complaining. Alive was good enough for me. All this to sell a book! And so far, all I’ve managed is give away the copy in my carry on to my seat mate, who didn’t offer to buy one.

But as I blew along 64 West from Norfolk (or NorF*ck; to pronounce it right, “you have to say the dirty word,” I was told) to Williamsburg in my rented Kia, and chanced upon Simon & Garfunkel’s Kathy from Bookends with its magnificent chorus of “All come to look for America!” just as I passed the exit for Historic Jamestown Settlement, I had to pinch myself to be sure I hadn’t died and gone to heaven.

Setting up the book tour. Here’s what I know about setting up a book tour. The first and most important thing to realize is that most bookstores don’t really want you if you aren’t already famous because they’ve seen years of authors sitting behind a table loaded with their books, and almost nobody attending or purchasing.

Therefore, it is hard to set up a book tour; it takes time and persistence, and you need to begin at least three months before you plan to start the tour and figure you will be working on setting dates for at least two months.

Don’t expect to sell a bunch of books while on tour. The tour has several purposes:

(1) getting to know bookstore owners/employees and, more important, getting booksellers to know you;

(2) getting some readers to know you;

(3) getting your book into bookstores where the booksellers remember you and your book, and will continue to hand sell it; and

(4) selling a few books with a personal touch, and saying to each person who buys one: “If you like it, please tell your friends and family.”

My tour began with the totally naive gesture of me purchasing airline tickets with frequent flyer miles, that put me on the East Coast for 2 weeks. The only reasons it wasn’t totally insane were: (1) frequent flyer miles; and (2) my daughter and parents reside in NY and VT respectively, and I’ll see them all for Thanksgiving. By perseverance I have managed to book nine events for the fifteen non-flight days I am here.

Not bad. Here’s how I did it:

First, my initial contacts were made by my “publicist”. The fact is, I don’t actually have a “publicist”. Unless you are published by a big house that has decided to bless your book, or have big bucks to shell out to a publicist – I’m talking $50 – $150 per hour, or in one case I know, a $10,000 flat fee – you are your own publicist by default. It is a full-time job, or as close to it as you can possibly eke out from your other remunerative activities (you have some, right? – I hope so, cause we’re all striving as writers for that mythical ten cents an hour!).

But even though you are your own publicist, that’s not good enough for the initial contact. Few bookstores want a writer who’s such a loser that they have to book their own appearance. So my small-press publisher made the initial contacts for me – mostly from a list of contacts that I generated using the internet. One great source is the American Booksellers’ Association website – they have a state-by-state, city-by-city directory of their members, hot-linked to the members’ websites.

Those first contacts should be by email with detailed information (Title, Author, publisher, ISBN, cloth/trade/mass, price, where in distribution, “Please book me for an event”, when you’ll be there, contact, attached synopsis, press release, cover image, author bio). Followed the next day by a telephone call.

Once the first contacts were made by my “publicist”, it was acceptable for me to follow up. And follow up. And follow up.

Every few days I followed up and then put a new “To Do” in my computer calendar to follow up again in a few days until I finally either got: (1) booked for an event; or (2) “No.” Then I marked it in my notes, and if it was “No” I dredged up a new contact in the area (or continued to follow several in the area simultaneously).

When (not “if”) you get a “NO”, try to make it work for you. Always say that’s fine, I understand, but would you please carry my book? They’ve just said “no” to you; most people don’t like to say “no”, so now they get to say “yes, of course.” Whether they will or not, who knows? – but they’re more likely to.

One venue booked me for a big lecture, then later wrote an email saying that the lecture had to be canceled. I was very understanding, saying that just a book signing would be fine. I think they meant to cancel me completely, but now I’ve got a book signing.

Never, ever, blow your cool. Remember, we’re just writers – a dime a dozen. When you’re JA Jance there will be time enough to act the prima donna, if that’s really how you want to be remembered. But for now, nobody wants a hothead in their shop.

And besides, booksellers are some of the finest, most dedicated and underpaid people in the universe. They are there for love of books, not filthy lucre, of which there is precious little.

Even when you are booked, you are not done. You still need to follow up – check their website to be sure you are listed; if not, re-send all the info just to “help you update your events listings”; be sure they’ve got books, and there aren’t any distribution problems. Be sure they’ve got a poster if you are going to be able to send or bring one.

An example of the care and feeding the tour needs, and the need to stay cool, is the call I got from my publisher a month or so before leaving. “Congratulations,” she said, “you’ve pissed off your first Virginian!” We had discussed whether Virginians would be open to a Pacific Northwesterner messing with their history (even though it our history too!), and this seemed a portent of pitchforks to come. The ARC found its way to this bookstore’s most valued customer – a retired banker – who reported back that he was offended by my lack of respect for treasured historical figures.

I hasten to add that I love my characters, even the villains, but I don’t idolize them. Even lofty figures like John Marshall and Patrick Henry come to the page warts and all. Anyway, the owner was determined to cancel the one bookstore signing I had in Richmond (the other signing was at the John Marshall House). But another ARC and calm dialogue defused the situation, and now I count this bookseller as a colleague and Just Deceits enthusiast. And, I might add, all the other Virginians I met were very gracious and seemed genuinely interested in my book.

In addition, if you want to have anybody present at the signing you have to shake the trees till the nuts fall out. Whatever publicity you can think of – postcards, emails to friends and/or groups with an interest in your subject, small newpaper ads or review copies, radio spots if you can get them, facebook and goodreads announcements, booktour DOT com (which I could never get to work!), skinnydip in the town fountain two nights before (leaving one day for the story to run in the local paper and for you to get out of jail).

Be creative! Getting the word out is an entire blog topic, and that’s not this blog.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about how to sell a book once you actually convince people to come to your book signing.



Posted on - 4 Comments on Author bios, part VII: a picture is allegedly worth a thousand words, but in a bio, you seldom get to use that many

Author bios, part VII: a picture is allegedly worth a thousand words, but in a bio, you seldom get to use that many

All throughout my lovely long weekend (hey, even bloggers occasionally like a day off), I could have sworn I heard the muffled cries of my readers from afar, small as the mews of freshly-born kittens. “But Anne,” these wee voices called after me, “you didn’t tell us how to format an author bio…and you ALWAYS tell us how to format things…”

At least, I think that’s what they were saying; it’s also possible that they were merely reading a particularly bad translation of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince very, very slowly. Wafting ghostly voices are notoriously inarticulate.

Assuming that my first interpretation was indeed correct, let’s talk format.

The bio is always the last page in a submission packet, but unless a bio is part of a book proposal, it should neither be numbered nor include a slug line. In a novel submission, it should be placed at the end of the pages you’re submitting, regardless of whether you have been asked to send a full or a partial manuscript.

It should always be in the same typeface and font as the rest of the manuscript or book proposal. No exceptions. (And if you’re unfamiliar with the typefaces the publishing industry tends to prefer, or even that such preferences exist, you might want to consider consulting the STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED category on the list at right with all deliberate speed.)

Beyond those limitations, there are two standard formats for an author bio. The first is very straightforward: a single page, double-spaced, in standard manuscript format. (If that last term was a mystery to you, I can only reiterate my suggestion that you visit the STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED category on the list at right. Improperly-formatted manuscripts are far, far more likely to be rejected than ones that look professional.)

The author’s name should be centered on the top of the page, resulting in a document that looks little something like this:

Some would argue (including me, if memory serves, the last time I tackled this topic here) that the text should be additionally decorated by either the first line of the page or the first line under the author’s name reading, “Author bio.” Not a startlingly original title, it’s true, but you must admit that it’s descriptive.

I no longer advise this, for the simple reason that a significant and apparently growing segment of the agent population now seems to prefer that their clients dispense with this little piece of self-evident labeling. Most of the bio-writers I know are only too glad to omit it, as it permits an extra line of text in what is, let’s face it, a rather brief space into which to cram one’s charms.

Personally, I use the other type of bio format, the kind that includes a photo: half a page, single-spaced, with a 4×6 photograph centered 1 inch from the top of the page, above the text. In between the photo and the text, the author’s name appears, also centered.

The end result looks a little something like this:

Admittedly, the LP’s picture is a trifle larger in this example than I would advise using — ideally, the photo should take up only the top third of the page, and here, LP has opted to allow the visuals to extend considerably lower, as some less animated authors also choose to do. It’s a legitimate choice, certainly, but anybody out there notice the down side?

If you said, “By gum, that looks a whole lot like 157 words, rather than the 250 or so I was hoping to include on my bio,” give yourself a gold star for the day. Heck, give yourself two; they’re small.

The easiest way to get that photo onto the page — and the only way, if you intend to e-mail your bio without first running the hard copy through a scanner — is to get a friend with a digital camera take a picture that you like, then use the image as clip art to be inserted on your author bio page.

If this sounds like far, far too close an intimacy with technology for you, take the photo to a copy center and ask the nice folks behind the counter to arrange a color copy so that the picture and the text are on the same page. For a small fee, they will probably be delighted to produce a stack of snail mail-able hard copies for you.

I can tell you from experience, though: do NOT wait until you need an author photo to have your picture taken. Many, many aspiring writers hold off, assuming (usually wrongly) that their future publishing houses will take care of — and pay for — this detail for them.

These well-meaning souls almost invariably end up unhappy with the author photos on their respective dust jackets.

Why, the camera-shy gasp? Well, it often takes many tries to obtain a photograph that you like enough to want to see mass-produced — or one that will look good in the school photo-size viable for most book jackets. It’s a bit easier now than it was prior to digital photography, of course; now, even an amateur can take 500 snapshots in an endeavor to find the perfect pose.

Yet when dear self is making the decision — and when a poor choice is going to haunt one for the rest of one’s literary life, smirking back at one from jackets, websites, the publishers’ catalogue, and, if you’re lucky, next to you at a packed signing in a major bookstore — believe me, dear self is going to want some time to equivocate.

Seriously, published authors wrestle with this one all the time.

That’s one reason that you don’t always recognize your favorite authors at book signings, incidentally; established authors’ photos are often a decade or more out of date. It’s not merely out of vanity, in order to appear more youthful to their readers (although I could name some names here), but because the photo-selecting process can be tedious and expensive.

Another excellent reason not to leave the construction of your author bio to the last minute, eh?

I’ve been sensing some tentative hand-raising for several paragraphs now. “Um, Anne,” some of you pipe up, “could you explain a bit more about why the reasoning about the publisher’s taking care of the photo is wrong? I always thought they just kept a bunch of professional photographers on staff to handle this sort of thing.”

Um, no. Posed, professional studio-taken photographs used to be more common on book jackets than they are today, but those photos were not in-house. At best, a publisher in the bad old days might cough up the dosh to have a pro snap some pictures, which made perfect sense: since this photo is usually also reproduced in the publisher’s catalogue, too, they were the clear beneficiaries.

But in recent years, that practice has become rare, especially for first-time authors. So guess who usually ends up paying for the professional photos you DO see?

Uh-huh.

I speak with aspiring writers all the time who are shocked — shocked! — to learn that the author is responsible for obtaining the photograph that graces the dust jacket. Now, the author’s photo is often posted on his website as well, but chances are that that the publisher is still not going to pay anyone to take a picture of you until you are very well established indeed.

Yes, you’re right: this is yet another expense that the publishing world has shifted onto writers. Sorry. But if you get your talented friends snapping now, you might just end up with a stellar photo you love at a fraction of the cost of a professional shoot by the time you need it.

I just mention.

All of this, of course, begs the question: even that it can be expensive in terms of both time and money to come up with a photo to accompany your author bio, is it really worth your while to use format #2?

As is so often the case with strategic decisions, be they literary, military, or just plain office politics, the answer is: it depends.

If you happen to be outstandingly attractive, yes, it is pretty much always going to be worth your while, and not just because Millicent is shallow. (She isn’t, typically.) These days, the marketing departments at publishing houses actually do want to know if an author is photogenic — and telegenic — if a book is expected to be a big seller.

If you tend to find potential agents and editors by accosting them at conferences and/or classes, it is worth your while to shell out for the small additional expense of producing an author bio with a photo of you on it. The reason for this is simple: it makes it easier for agents and editors to remember having spoken to you.

Not in a “My, but that’s an attractive writer!” sort of way, but in a “Hey, I have a distinct recollection of having had a rather pleasant conversation a month ago with that person” manner.

PLEASE do not take the fact that a nudge to the memory is sometimes necessary as a reflection upon either your book’s market chances, the quality of your writing, or your inherent memorability as a human being. As I mentioned earlier in this series, the average agent speaks to somewhere between 50 and 200 eager writers at a conference. The chances of his remembering your name in retrospect are rather low, even if you and your book are genuinely scintillating.

This can be true, perversely, even if the agent in question appeared to be foaming at the mouth with greed when you pitched your project. Post-pitch enthusiasm has a nasty habit of fading on the way back to NYC; it must have something to do with the coffee served on the flight back.

Again, sorry. Let’s get back to practicalities.

It is less important to look pretty in your author photo than to look interesting, generally speaking — and here, the standard posed, gently-smiling-under-indirect-light professional shot may actually work against you. So unless your book’s subject matter is very serious indeed, try not to make your bio picture look like a standard, posed publicity shot.

Why? For the same reason that when you flip back through your yearbook, half of the senior pictures seem more or less interchangeable: just looking nice tends not to be memorable.

You may laugh, but it is amazing how many author photos look like senior class pictures, devoid of personality. Try to not to look as though you were voted Most Likely to Write a Book.

But unless you are writing something pretty sizzling, you might not want to look as though you were voted Most Likely to Grace a Street Corner, either, if you catch my drift. Glamour shots became kind of popular in the mid-1990s, especially for female authors, but at this point, lenses that seem to have been bedewed with Vaseline make a picture seem dated.

And yes, Virginia, you SHOULD worry about what your author photo says about you — and not just because you don’t want your dear old white-headed mother to pick up your novel years from now in Barnes & Noble, clutch her chest, and keel over, crying over your boudoir shot, “I can’t believe my baby let someone PHOTOGRAPH her like that!”

The author photo is another opportunity to express your personality – which, lest we forget, is part of what you are selling when you pitch a book, like it or not, especially if you are marketing a memoir.

Here’s a radical idea: why not strive to make the tone of the picture match the tone of the book, or have the environment echo the subject matter? You might want to surround yourself with objects associated with your book’s topic for the photo, but avoid making the picture too busy. You want the viewer to focus on your charming face, after all.

One of the best author photos I ever saw was of an arson investigator. Far from being airbrushed and neat, his face was barely visible: he was covered in soot, crouched in front of the ashes of a burned-down building out of which he had apparently recently crawled.

Did it make him look attractive? No, unless the observer happened to be turned on by smoke stains. Did I believe instantly and absolutely that he knew his subject upside-down and backwards? You bet.

I know that pulling this all together seems daunting, but trust me, the more successful you become, the more you will bless my name for urging you to put together a killer bio, with or without photo, in advance. Once you start getting published, even articles in relatively small venues or on websites, people in the industry will start asking for your author bio and photo.

At that point, when editors are clamoring to hear your — yes, YOUR — magical words, I can absolutely guarantee that the last thing you will want to be doing is sitting hunched over your keyboard, trying to summarize your entire life in 250 words.

Okay, not the very last thing: the very last thing you will want to be doing is scrambling through your bottom desk drawer, searching for a picture of yourself that would not make you cringe ten years hence.

Now that I’ve thoroughly terrified you, I shall sign off for the day. Next time, I shall tie up a few last loose ends regarding bios, photos, and their production. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Synopsis-writing 101, part IX: a much-needed pep talk, or, when and where primal screaming is and is not constructive

I’ve been worrying about something: has my advice that virtually any aspiring writer will be better off sitting down to construct a winning synopsis substantially before s/he is likely to need to produce one coming across as a trifle callous, as if I were laboring under the impression that the average aspiring writer doesn’t already have difficulty carving out time in a busy day to write at all? Why, some of you may well be wondering, would I suggest that you should take on more work — and such distasteful work at that?

I assure you, I have been suggesting this precisely because I am sympathetic to your plight. I completely understand why aspiring writers so often push producing one to the last possible nanosecond before it is needed: it genuinely is a pain to summarize the high points of a plot or argument in a concise-yet-detail-rich form.

Honestly, I get it.

As it is such a different task than writing a book, involving skills widely removed from observing a telling moment in exquisite specificity or depicting a real-life situation with verve and insight, the expectation that any good book writer should be able to produce a great synopsis off the cuff actually isn’t entirely reasonable. In fact, the very prospect of pulling one together can leave a talented writer feeling like this:

the-scream-detail.tiff

Yet since we cannot change the industry’s demand for them, all we writers can do is work on the supply end: by taking control of WHEN we produce our synopses, we can make the generation process less painful and generally improve the results.

Okay, so these may not sound like like the best motivations for taking a few days out of your hard-won writing time to pull together a document that’s never going to be published before you absolutely have to do it. Unless you happen to be a masochist who just adores wailing under time pressure, though, procrastinating about producing one is an exceedingly bad idea.

But as of today, I’m no longer going to ask you to take my word for that. For those of you who are still resistant to the idea of writing one before you are specifically asked for it I have two more inducements to offer you today.

First — and this is a big one — taking the time to work on a synopsis BEFORE you have an actual conversation with an agent (either post-submission or at a conference) is going to make it easier for you to talk about your book. And that’s extremely important for conference-goers, e-mail queriers, and pretty much everyone who is ever going to be trying to convince someone in the publishing industry to take an interest in a manuscript, because (brace yourselves) the prevailing assumption is that a writer who cannot talk about her work professionally probably is not going to produce a professional-quality manuscript.

I know, I know — from a writer’s point of view, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; we all know (or are) shy-but-brilliant writers who would rather scarf down cups of broken glass than give a verbal pitch, yet can produce absolute magic on the page. Unfortunately, in contexts where such discussion is warranted, these gifted recluses are out of luck.

I know it’s hard, but try to think of this phenomenon in a positive light: an aspiring writer who has learned to discuss his work professionally is usually better able to get folks in the industry to sit down and read it.

Investing some serious time in developing a solid, professional-quality synopsis can be very, very helpful in this respect. The discipline required to produce it forces you to think of your baby as a marketable product, as well as a piece of complex art and physical proof that you have locked yourself away from your kith and kin for endless hours, creating.

Even writers who are absolutely desperate to sell their first books tend to forget that it is a product intended for a specific market. As I have mentioned earlier in this series, in the throes of resenting the necessity of producing a query letter and synopsis, it is genuinely difficult NOT to grumble about having to simplify a beautifully complicated plot, set of characters, and/or argument.

But think about it for a second: any agent who signs you is going to HAVE to summarize the book in order to market it to editors. So is any editor who falls in love with it, in order to pitch it to an editorial committee.

There is just no way around summarization, in other words. Just get on with it.

Here’s another good reason to invest the time: by having labored to reduce your marvelously complex story or argument to its basic elements, you will be far less likely to succumb to that bugbear of pitchers, the Pitch that Would Not Die.

Those of you who have pitched at conferences know what I’m talking about, right? As anyone who has ever sat down for coffee or a drink with a regularly conference-attending agents can tell you, pretty much all of them have at least one horror story about a pitch that went on for an hour, because the author did not have the vaguest conception what was and was not important to emphasize in his plot summary.

Trust me, you do not want to be remembered for that.

For those of you who haven’t yet found yourself floundering for words in front of an agent or editor, allow me to warn you: the unprepared pitcher almost always runs long. When you are signed up for a 10-minute pitch meeting, you really do need to be able to summarize your book within just a few minutes — harder than it sounds! — so you have time to talk about other matters.

You know, mundane little details, such as whether the agent wants to read the book in question.

Contrary to the prevailing writerly wisdom that dictates that verbal pitching and writing are animals of very different stripes, spending some serious time polishing your synopsis is great preparation for pitching. Even the most devoted enemy of brevity will find it easier to chat about the main thrust of a book if he’s already figured out what it is.

Stop laughing — I have been to a seemingly endless array of writers’ conferences over the years, and let me tell you, I’ve never attended one that didn’t attract at least a handful of aspiring writers who seemed not to be able to tell anyone else what their books were about.

Which is, in case you were wondering, the origin of that old industry chestnut:

Agent: So, what’s your book about?
Writer: About 900 pages.

The third inducement: a well-crafted synopsis is something of a rarity, so if you can produce one as a follow-up to a good meeting at a conference, or to tuck in with your first 50 pages, you will look like a star.

You would be astonished (at least I hope you would) at how often an otherwise well-written submission is accompanied by a synopsis obviously dashed off in the ten minutes prior to the post office’s closing, as though the writing quality, clarity, and organization of it weren’t to be evaluated at all. I don’t think that sheer deadline panic accounts for the pervasiveness of the disorganized synopsis; I suspect resentment.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, I’ve met countless writers who don’t really understand why the synopsis is necessary at all, and thus hate it. All too often, the result is a synopsis that gives the impression not that the writer is genuinely excited about this book and eager to market it, but rather that he is deeply and justifiably angry that it needed to be written at all.

Believe me, to an experienced eye, writerly resentment shows up BEAUTIFULLY against the backdrop of a synopsis.

No, really, the peevish, just-the-facts-ma’am synopsis is the norm, not the exception; as any Millicent would be happy to tell you, it’s as though half the synopsis-writers out there believe they’re entering their work in an anti-charm contest. The VAST majority of novel synopses simply scream that their authors regarded the writing of them as tiresome busywork instituted by the industry to satisfy some sick, sadistic whim prevalent amongst agents, a hoop through which they enjoy seeing all of the doggies jump.

Frustrated by what appears to be an arbitrary requirement, many writers just throw together a synopsis in a fatal rush and shove it into an envelope, hoping that no one will pay much attention to it. It’s the first 50 pages that count, right?

Wrong. In case you thought I was joking the other 47 times I have mentioned it over the last couple of weeks, EVERYTHING you submit to an agent or editor is a writing sample. If you can’t remember that full-time, have it tattooed on the back of your hand.

While frustration is certainly understandable, it’s self-defeating to treat the synopsis as unimportant or (even more common) to toss it out in a last-minute frenzy. Find a more constructive outlet for your annoyance — and make sure that every page you submit is your best writing.

Caught your attention with that constructive outlet quip, didn’t I? Realistically, it’s not going to help your book’s progress one iota to engage in passive-aggressive blaming of any particular agent or editor (or, even less sensible, their screeners and assistants). They did not make the rules, by and large.

And even if they did, let’s face it — in real life, almost nobody is actually brave enough to say to an agent or editor, “No, you can’t have a synopsis, you lazy so-and-so. Read the whole damned book, if you liked my pitch or query, because, as any fool can tell you, that’s the only way you’re going to find out if I can write is to READ MY WRITING!”

Okay, so it’s mighty satisfying to contemplate saying it. Picture it as vividly as you can, then move on.

I’m quite serious about this. My mental health assignment for you while working on the synopsis: once an hour, picture the nastiest, most aloof agent in the world, and mentally bellow your frustrations at him at length. Be as specific as possible, but try not to repeat yourself; the goal here is to touch upon every scintilla of resentment lodged in the writing part of your brain.

Then find the nearest mirror, gaze into it, and tell yourself to get back to work. Your professional reputation — yes, and your ability to market your writing successfully — is at stake.

I know, the exercise sounds silly, but it will make you feel better to do it, I promise. In fact, I think it would be STERLING preparation for either the querying process or a conference to name your least-favorite sofa cushion the Industry and pound it silly twice a day. I’m all in favor of venting hostility on inanimate objects, rather than on human ones.

Far better that your neighbors hear you screaming about how hard it all is than that your resentment find its way into your synopsis. Or your query letter. Or even into your verbal pitch.

Yes, I’ve seen all three happen — but I’ve never seen it work to the venting writer’s advantage. I’ll spare you the details, because, trust me, these were not pretty incidents.

Next time, I shall delve into the knotty issue of how a synopsis folded up behind a cold query letter might differ from one that is destined to sit underneath a partial. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Synopsis-writing 101, part VII: the nonfiction synopsis revisited, or, tell me again who needs to read this book and why?

For the benefit of those of you who are joining us in mid-series, I’ve been spending the last week or so going over (and over, and over) the ins and outs of that most dreaded of submission-packet candy, the humble synopsis. No one can say that I haven’t been thorough about it this time around, I suspect: we’ve covered what a synopsis is and isn’t (9/22) and how it should be formatted (9/23-29), as well as how to make it as brief as a single page (9/23-27) or as long as 5 (9/29-10/2).

(For those of you brand-new to this blog, welcome and fair warning: I’m given to exhaustive multi-part examinations of, well, everything. Blame my years in graduate school — and if you’re looking for a how-to for something specific, I would highly encourage you to peruse the rather extensive category list located on the lower right-hand side of this very page.)

Although many of the principles covered earlier in this series will apply to either a fiction or nonfiction synopsis — or to a memoir synopsis, which is stylistically sort of a combination of both — last time, I began talking about the specialized problems facing nonfiction synopsizers. (Hey, if it isn’t a word, it should be.)

Last time, if you will recall, we established that a nonfiction synopsis has four goals — and that those aims are different from the primary goals of a novel synopsis. To recap, a NF synopsis should:

(1) give the argument of the book in some detail;

(2) give some indication of how you intend to prove your case;

(3) demonstrate why the book will appeal to a large enough market niche to make publishing it economically worthwhile, and

(4) show beyond any reasonable question that you are the best-qualified person in the universe to write the book.

I ended yesterday’s post with a cliffhanger: no matter how large the prospective market for your book, I told my wide-eyed readers gathered around the campfire, is you can’t legitimately assume that an agent or editor will be aware of just how many potential readers inhabit it.

Thus, when you are crafting a synopsis — or query letter, or book proposal — it’s prudent to assume that they will underestimate it…and thus the market appeal of your book.

Do I already hear some impatient huffing out there? “Aren’t you a little confused, Anne?” I hear a few NF writers protest. “While the book proposal, the query letter, and the pitch may descend to the sordid mention of market conditions and readership, the synopsis is supposed to be a summary of what the book is about. Therefore, it must be entirely about content. Kindly mend your ways accordingly, miss.”

You’re partially right, impatient huffers: a fiction synopsis should indeed concern itself entirely with its book’s subject matter and voice, rather than marketing concerns. A professional nonfiction synopsis, on the other hand, is mostly about content, but often contains the elements of a micro-proposal as well.

Why? Well, perhaps not all currently working nonfiction authors would agree with me, but marketability typically plays a far, far more important role in whether an agent, editor, or even contest judge will be interested in a NF project than in novel; NF, after all, is usually sold on a book proposal, not the entire manuscript, and proposals, for the benefit of those of you who have not yet written one, are made up almost exclusively of marketing material.

Why? Well, most of the time, NF sells better.

Don’t believe me, fiction-readers? Walk into the nearest large chain bookstore and take a good, long look around. Are most of the books fiction or nonfiction? Assuming it is the latter (as is the case in most non-specialist bookstores), how are the bookstore’s NF sections arranged?

99.99% of the time, it will be by subject matter — unlike the fiction, which is usually arranged by author’s last name, with perhaps separate sections for the larger genres.

Which means, at the querying and submission stages, that a NF synopsis that acts like a fiction synopsis — sticking to the story and nothing but the story — is typically a less effective marketing tool than one that gives some indication of what kinds of readers are in desperate need of this particular book and why.

Hey, I didn’t make the rules; I just attempt to clarify them a trifle.

Yes, the quality of the writing does make a difference in any submission, but the fact is, while novels can — and do — sell on the writing alone, even the best-written nonfiction is seldom marketed primarily upon the quality of the writing. In fact, that i’s not at all unusual for an author to be able to sell a NF book, even if it’s a memoir, on only a single chapter and a book proposal.

Given this prevailing expectation, trust me: you’ll be better off if you make it pellucidly clear in the synopsis who your target market is, why your book will appeal to them, how and why your subject matter is interesting — and, if you’ll pardon my committing the sacrilege, why a non-expert in the field might find it fascinating.

And as much as I hate to be the one to break it to everyone, “Because I spent two years writing it!” is not a sufficient answer to any or all of the last four questions on that list. In the throes of writing, revising, and querying a book, it can be hard to remember that.

Remember, too, that for the synopsis to whet an agent, editor, or contest judge’s appetite for reading the proposal — the essential task of a synopsis tucked into a query packet, right? — the book’s content needs to come across as not merely intriguing to its target readership, but to industry types as well. So if you ever find yourself saying, “Well, that’s a little unclear, but my end readers will get it,” take that as a sign from the heavens that you should be rushing to revise that particular piece.

As with a fiction synopsis, you’re going to want to show why the book is appealing, rather than merely saying so — and the trick to that, often, lies in eschewing generalities in favor of juicy, intriguing specifics.

In this spirit, I reiterate: when writing a synopsis, it’s merely prudent to assume that professional readers will underestimate the size of your target audience…and thus the market appeal of your book.

This is particularly true if you are pushing a book about anything that ever occurred west of, say, Albany to a NYC-based agent or editor, or any story set north of Santa Barbara or east of Los Vegas to an LA-based one.

Why? Well, let’s just say that the news media are not the only folks who think that little that happens to anyone outside of their own city limits is worth reporting, alas. If those of us who lived outside of the major urban centers thought this way about, say, New York City or London, we would be called provincial.

I’m quite serious about this. It seems silly in the age of lightning-fast electronic communication and swift travel across time zones, but regional prejudices still run strong enough that you might actually find yourself explaining to a charming, urbane agent with an MA in American Literature from Columbia or a law degree from Yale that yes, the inhabitants of Boise CAN support a symphony, and indeed have for many years.

And schools. And indoor plumbing.

I know: depressing. But being aware that agents may not be hip to your market means that you, savvy marketer that you are, can compensate for it by coming right out and saying in your synopsis — and perhaps in your cover letter as well — just how big and eager your target market actually is.

What can happen if you don’t, you ask? One of the most common rejection reasons for NF: it’s very, very easy for a book to be labeled as appealing to a niche market.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, niche market is industry-speak for “Well, no one I know would buy this book…”

Okay, so I’m exaggerating a trifle: it technically means that the pros think that a book would only be marketable to what they assume to be a tiny demographic. Trout fisherfolk, for instance, or people with cerebral palsy.

Yes, yes, I know: in actuality, both of these groups are rather large, but someone unfamiliar with those demographics might not be aware of that. To be blunt about it, I’ve never seen a guesstimate that wasn’t low, sometimes by a factor of millions.

Please, I implore you, don’t assume that an agent, editor, or contest judge will necessarily be charmed enough by the writing in your synopsis (or book proposal — or book, for that matter) to conduct a little independent research. Screeners in agencies and publishing houses simply don’t have the time, and often, contest organizers specifically tell their judges that they may rate ONLY what’s on the page.

Which means, in practice, that Millicent is extremely unlikely to dismiss that book aimed at anglers without bothering to find out just how many people there actually ARE who habitually fish for trout.

Such as, for instance, our pal Ernest Hemingway, above. He had — and has — a whole lot of company. But I suspect that you’d have to run into a trout fisherperson or two before you’d see a book on trout and spontaneously cry, “By gum, there’s an immense market for this!”

The same often holds true for regional interest, alas. Due to the perversity of where books get published in the United States, a story set in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or San Francisco will often be deemed of national interest, meaning that book buyers in other parts of the country (and world) might reasonably be expected to flock to the bookstores for it.

Because, obviously, readers the world over are sitting on the edges of their seats, wondering what’s going on in Brooklyn these days. Or so I surmise, from the immense number of books set there.

But let that SAME story be set in Minneapolis, Shreveport, Olympia, or Halifax, and NYC, LA, Chicago, and San Francisco-based agents and editors tend to dismiss it as appealing only to audiences in the region where it was set. Think about it: if THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA hadn’t been set in Manhattan, do you honestly think that any major publishing house would have given it a second glance?

Over the years, I’ve heard many agents and editors tell writers of so-called regional works that they’d be better off submitting their NF and even novels to regional publishers, but in recent years, I’ve begun to wonder to whom they are referring. The publishing industry is not, after all, like theatre — not every major city will spontaneously see a publishing house spring up out of the ground, started by spunky youngsters in their dorm basements, if necessary.

Can’t you just picture it? “I’ve got a barn,” a would-be publisher pants breathlessly, “and you have a mimeograph machine. Let’s publish some books!”

Doesn’t happen very often, alas. It’s a lovely fantasy, though, isn’t it?

Even for nonfiction, it is definitely trickier to interest agents at the big agencies in subject matter unfamiliar to denizens of the Eastern seaboard. So it’s a stellar idea to use your marketing materials to make the case that your subject matter IS of national interest.

Here, as in the pitch, statistics can be your friend — and they needn’t be statistics about just how many people have already bought books on your subject matter, either. If you’re writing a blistering exposé of bear abuse in Montana, for instance, it would a VERY good idea to mention in your synopsis just how many visitors Yellowstone sees in a year, because chances are, Manhattanites will have no idea. (For more hints on how to find statistics to back up your book, please see the YOUR BOOK’S SELLING POINTS category at right.)

In a NF book synopsis, you not only need to establish the importance of the subject matter — you need to demonstrate that you are an expert in it. If “Why are you the best person to write this book?” seems secondary to the subject matter, I’m guessing that you probably haven’t pitched a NF book lately.

Seriously, it’s the first question almost anyone in the industry will ask after you mention casually that you are writing a NF book. “So,” they’ll say, reserving comment about the marketability of your topic until after they hear the answer to this particular question, “what’s your platform?”

Platform is industry-speak for the background that qualifies you to write the book — the array of credentials, expertise, and life experience that qualifies you as an expert on the topic.

Put another way, platform is the industry term for why anyone should trust a NF author enough to want to read her book, as opposed to any of the other similar books on the market. The platform need not consist of educational credentials or work experience — in fact unless you write in a technical, scientific, or medical field, it generally has less to do with your educational credentials than your life experience.

But by all means, if you happen to be a former Secretary of State or NBA superstar, do mention it. Don’t be downhearted if you haven’t yet held a cabinet post in your field of expertise, however. The platform is ANY reason, or collection of reasons, that you are the single best person currently residing in the universe to write this particular book.

Give some serious thought to your platform before you begin to market your book — and yes, that means before you sit down to write the synopsis, too. All of you NF writers out there should not only be prepared to answer questions about your platform BEFORE you have ANY contact with an agent or editors — your synopsis should contain at least passing mention of your expertise.

This is true, incidentally, even if your book happens to be a memoir.

“Wait just a memory-picking minute!” I hear the memoirists out there cry. “Isn’t it pretty darned obvious that I would be the single best living authority upon my own life?”

Not necessarily, from the industry’s point of view.

Yes, I know: it seems self-evident that a memoirist would be an expert on the story he tells, because it’s his own life. But a memoir is always about something in addition to the life story of its author, and your platform should include some reference to why you are qualified to write about that other subject matter as well.

If your memoir is about spending your teenage years in a foreign country, for instance, take a sentence or two of your synopsis to talk about how being an outsider gave you a unique perspective on it. If your memoir rips the lid off the steamy secrets of a cereal factory, you’ll be better off if you use your decade’s worth of experience filling those boxes as evidence that you are a credible expert on flakes. And if your childhood memoir deals with your love affair with trains, make sure you include the fact that you spent 17 years of your life flat on your stomach, going “woo, woo” at a dizzying array of model trains.

You get the picture. It’s not enough to make your subject matter sound fascinating: in your synopsis, your account needs to come across as both fascinating and credible.

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

I could feel fiction writers’ blood pressure rising throughout the last few paragraphs, but don’t panic: technically, a novelist doesn’t NEED a platform. Go back and reread that comforting earlier bit about fiction often selling on the quality of the writing alone; repeat as often as necessary until your head no longer feels as though it’s going to explode.

It’s always a nice touch, though, if a fiction writer can mention a platform plank or two in her query letter. But for fiction, keep your platform out of your synopsis; in the eyes of the industry, self-promotion in a novel synopsis tends to be regarded as compensation for some heretofore-unsuspected weakness in the plot or the writing.

Before anyone points out to me that other sources give different advice about crafting synopses, I’m going to be brutally honest with you here: very few writing teachers will advise you to include your platform in your synopsis, even for a NF book. That’s material for the author bio, they will tell you.

Many writers include a background paragraph in their query letters — a great place to present your platform, eh? — but personally, I think it makes a whole lot of sense to give a quick nod to the platform in the NF synopsis as well, if it makes your work sound more credible.

As I mentioned earlier in this series, it’s not uncommon for a synopsis to end up in different hands than the query letter, after all. They’re not going to know if you don’t tell them, I always say. Go ahead and state your qualifications, but keep it brief, and make it clear how those qualifications, well, qualify you to write this book.

More wit and wisdom on the synopsis follows in the days to come. Keep up the good work!

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Synopsis-writing 101, part VI: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the…oh, you only want a couple of pages?

oz-the-great-and-terrible.tiff

Okay, so I did end up taking a day off for my birthday — but, perversely, it was the day after. Suffice it to say that there’s been quite a bit going on in my part of the world.

Back to the topic at hand, my ongoing series on how to craft an attention-grabbing synopsis BEFORE you need it, so you will not be thrown into forty-seven kinds of panic the instant an agent or editor asks you to send one. As those of you who write nonfiction may have noticed, I’ve been concentrating for the last few posts upon the specialized problems of novel synopses.

Specifically, if you will recall, I went on (and on and on) about the importance of a novel synopsis’ demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that its writer is a gifted storyteller. For nonfiction, the task is a trifle more complicated.

Don’t worry — I have a LOT of experience writing both types, as it happens: I’ve sold two memoirs to publishers, and my second novel is just starting to make the rounds. Not to mention all of the synopses I see as a frequent contest judge and even more frequent freelance editor. So yours truly has spent quite a bit of time in the last few years hunkered over the odd synopsis, let me tell you. I know whereat I speak.

In fact, just go ahead and imagine the following words of wisdom booming from the mouth of Oz, the Great and Terrible. It will save time and energy in the long run.

In a NF synopsis of any length, your goal is fourfold:

(1) to give the argument of the book in some detail;

(2) to give some indication of how you intend to prove your case;

(3) to demonstrate why the book will appeal to a large enough market niche to make publishing it worthwhile, and

(4) to show beyond any reasonable question that you are the best-qualified person in the universe to write the book.

In anywhere from 1-5 pages, depending upon what the agent, publishing house, or contest rules request. I’m not entirely sure that I proved half that much in my master’s thesis.

And let me tell you, it was a pretty good master’s thesis.

The argument is the most important element here — it’s imperative that the synopsis-reader be able to follow it. Show it in logical order.

Why is this so important? Well, in the synopsis, you should not only show the content of the argument, but also that you can argue coherently.

I’m already sensing some disgruntlement out there, amn’t I? “But Anne,” I hear some NF writers grumble, “this seems counterintuitive. Wouldn’t the best way for an agent or editor to check out my argumentative style be to, you know, read my book?”

I could shoot that one down right away, but first, let’s all take a mental holiday and picture how much easier all of our lives would be people in the publishing industry actually thought that way.

Ah, that’s nice: a world where writers’ talent was judged solely by thoughtful, well-paid, prose-loving agents and editors, lounging on comfy sofas in sun-drenched lofts, languidly turning over page after page of entire manuscripts sent to them by aspiring authors.

And look, outside that massive loft window — do I see a pig flying by, with Jean Harlow on his back, waving sparklers and smooching Clark Gable?

Okay, back to the real world: realistically, a nonfiction synopsis does indeed need to encapsulate the argument that it takes an entire book to make in just a couple of pages — or at least to establish the central question and indicate how you’re going to go about answering it.

Think of it as a tap-dancing audition, your two-minute chance to show your fancy footwork: if you argue well enough here, the agent will ask to see the argument in the book.

Did I just hear some gasps out there? “Two minutes?” a few of you squeak. “How closely can they possibly read my synopsis in that short amount of time?”

I didn’t mean to startle you — but yes, that’s roughly how long your synopsis will have under an agent’s (or, more likely, an agency screener’s) bloodshot, overworked eyes. These days, contrary to popular opinion, NF queries and submissions tend not to be treated to much closer or more respectful readings than novels. Popular opinion may have a point here, at least at the agency level, because nonfiction has historically been quite a bit easier to sell to the major publishing houses than fiction.

Go figure.

At this point in publishing history, though, the market is so tight that it just doesn’t make strategic sense for NF writers to assume that they — or, more accurately, we — don’t need to present book projects as professionally and eye-catchingly as novelists do.

So: two minutes, maximum, possibly less. Let’s face it, this isn’t a lot of time to establish an argument much more complicated than the recipe for your sainted mother’s cream of tomato soup.

Even if your mother’s methodology consisted primarily of opening a can of Campbell’s.

It is more than enough page space, though, to demonstrate that you have the writing skills to make an argument where each sentence leads logically to the next. It’s also enough time to show that you have a coherent plan for proving your propositions, and for indicating what evidence you intend to use.

If I seem to be harping on the necessity of making a COMPLETE, if skeletal, argument here, it is because the single most common mistake NF synopsizers make is to give only PART of the argument, or still worse, only the premise, with no indication of how they intend to make their case. Instead, they use the space to go on a rant about how necessary the book is, essentially squandering precious argumentative space with marketing jargon and premise.

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

To make it appear as solid in the synopsis as I’m sure it is in the manuscript, don’t forget to mention what kind of evidence you will be using to support your claims. Have you done extensive research? Exhaustive interviews? Hung out with the right people?

If you have a professional background in the subject matter of your book that unquestionably renders you an expert, or personal experience that gives you a unique insight into the subject, try to mention that in your opening paragraph, or at least in the second. Otherwise, stick to the subject matter, and explain what the book is going to teach people about it.

I use the term teach advisedly, because it is often quite helpful for synopsis writers to think of the task as producing a course overview for the lesson that is the book’s content: how will this book help readers, and what kind of readers will it help?

And once you have made that clear, how about demonstrating precisely what about your approach will captivate those readers as no other book will?

Of course — I’m not talking about TELLING a potential agent or editor how terrific the book is — that’s the book proposal’s job, right? — but SHOWING that you can write the heck out of this topic. Your first task, then, is to make your subject matter sound absolutely fascinating.

To achieve this successfully, you will need to show how your take on it is original. To do that, you are going to have to spell out your argument. Not merely in generalities, but in sufficient detail that — everyone chant it with me now — an agent, editor, or contest judge could understand it sufficiently to describe it to someone else without having read the book. Because, let’s face it, that’s precisely what Millicent the agency screener is going to have to do in order to get her boss to ask to see your book proposal or manuscript — and what her cousin Maury the editorial assistant will have to do to get his boss even to consider publishing it.

Have I convinced you yet that you really do need to present a cohesive theory here? And did I happen to mention the importance of its being cohesive?

Easier said than done, of course. In the author’s mind, the argument often lies the details, not in the larger, more theoretical points. How can you narrow it down? It’s helpful to have an outline of your proposed chapters in front of you, so you can use the synopsis to demonstrate how each chapter will build upon the next to make your overall case.

Oh, don’t groan. If you’re writing a NF book, you are going to need to pull together a chapter-by-chapter overview anyway, of course, to include in your book proposal: it’s called the annotated table of contents. This moniker is a tad misleading, because it brings to mind the simple chapter title + page number tables of contents we’ve all seen in published books. An annotated table of contents consists of the titles in order, yes, but it also contains a paragraph or two about the argument or material to be presented in that chapter.

For tips on how to pull this off successfully, please see the BOOK PROPOSALS category on the list at right. I’ll still be here when you get back. The rest of you may feel free to move on.

Don’t get so caught up in reproducing the argument in the synopsis, though, that you do not include a BRIEF explanation of why the world needs your book, and why you are the best person imaginable to write it. This is typically the greatest difference between a fiction and a nonfiction synopsis.

If you are writing on a subject that has already been well-trodden by past authors, it’s even more important to make these points clear. The synopsis needs to render it apparent to Millicent and Maury at a glance why your book is different and better than what’s already on the market.

In answer to the small, instinctive moans of protest that just escaped from some of your gullets, yes, this is repetitive with material you will cover in your book proposal. In most of the contexts in which your synopsis will travel, however — tucked into an envelope with a query letter; accompanying a sample chapter or contest entry; floating around a publishing house after an editor has already fallen in love with your proposal — the reader will not also be clutching your proposal.

In other words, your goal here is to produce a synopsis that shows off your writing skills, the strength of your argument, and the inherent marketability of your book in a fraction of the space allotted to a proposal.

Piece o’ cake, right?

There is no need to be heavy-handed in your own praise to achieve this, either. To prove it to you, I’m going to give you a sample opening, modest enough that it would strike no one as overbearing. Read carefully, as there will be a pop quiz afterward to see if you can spot the ways that this brief paragraph achieves Goals #3 and #4:

Have you ever wondered what goes on underneath the snow while you are skiing on top of it? Although there are many books currently on the market for the US’s 1.3 million snowboarding enthusiasts, MOUNTAINS MY WAY is the first to be written by a geologist. Seen through the eyes of a professional rock hound with thirty years of experience in the field, the reader is introduced to mountains as more than an array of cold, hard rocks: mountains emerge as a historical document, teeming with life and redolent of all of the stages of human history.

How did you do?

Give yourself points if you noticed that the opening question grabbed the reader, showing immediately how this book might relate to the reader’s practical life; a rhetorical question for which the book itself provides an answer is a great way to establish a book’s appeal at the very beginning of the synopsis.

Also, pat yourself on the back fifty times if you zeroed in on the subtle way in which this paragraph dissed the competition — the implication here is that the authors all previous books on the subject were such boneheads that THEY thought mountains were just collections of rocks. No one is naming names here, but those authors know who they are.

Still more points if you noted the clever (if I do say so myself) use of demographic information. (Which I made up wholesale for example’s sake, so please don’t quote them elsewhere.) If you have statistics on your prospective market, this is the place to mention them — here, and in your query letter, and in your pitch. As in:

There are currently two million Americans diagnosed with agoraphobia, yet there are few self-help books out there for them — and only one that is actually written by an agoraphobic, someone who truly understands what it feels like to be shut in by fear.

Why is it so important to hammer home the statistics in every conceivable forum, you ask? Well, no matter how large the prospective market for your book is (unless it is an already such a well-covered market that anyone in the industry could reasonably be expected know about it, such as golf fans), you can’t ever, ever assume that an agent or editor will be aware of its size.

ALWAYS assume that they will underestimate it — and thus the market appeal of your book.

On that stirring statement, I think I shall end for the day. More on NF synopses follows tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Synopsis-writing 101, part VI: la la la la TO ME

All right, I’ll admit it: this isn’t actually a picture of me at a former birthday. Unlike so many dark-eyed adult brunettes, I never was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed mite with pigtails. Also, like other children with autumn birthdays growing up in wine country, my family was usually harvesting a few tons of something on or about my birthday, so my cake tended to be consumed at school, as cupcakes. Oh, and I have always looked terrible in pastels; even as a very small child, I wouldn’t be caught dead in ‘em.

Otherwise, I assure you, this picture is an uncannily accurate reproduction of an annual event in my past.

Yesterday (known to literature-lovers everywhere as Pre-Anne Eve, natch), I gave a few genteel indications of how a 5-page synopsis — still, whatever some writing-advice websites claim, the most common requested length for a novel synopsis — might conceivably differ from a 1-page synopsis.

To be specific, I alleged that the extended synopsis should give a solid feel of the mood of the book and a basic plot summary. Rather than attempting to cram an in-depth summary of every twist and turn of the book into just a few pages, I suggested that a savvy writer might content herself with showing who the major characters are, what the major conflicts between them are, and illustrating how they played out by describing a few scenes with a wealth of sensual detail.

Or, to cast it in step-by-step terms:

(1) introduce the major characters and premise,

(2) demonstrate the primary conflict(s),

(3) show what’s at stake for the protagonist, and

(4) ideally, give some indication of the tone and voice of the book.

(5) show the primary story arc through BRIEF descriptions of the most important scenes. (For NF that isn’t story-based, present the planks of the overarching argument in logical order, along with some indication of how you intend to prove each point), and

(6) show how the plot’s primary conflict is resolved or what the result of adopting the book’s argument would be.

Let’s talk for a moment about #4, writing the synopsis in roughly the same voice and in the same tone as the novel it summarizes. As I’ve mentioned, a comic novel’s synopsis should contain a few chuckles; an ultra-serious one shouldn’t. A steamy romance’s synopsis should be at least a little bit sexy, a thriller’s a trifle scary, and so forth.

No need to get obsessed with making sure the tone is identical, of course — in the same ballpark will do. You just want to show that you are familiar with the type of writing expected in the type of novel you’ve written and can produce it consistently, even in a relatively dry document.

Why might an agent or editor want you to demonstrate the latter skill? Well, increasingly, authors are expected to promote their own books; it’s not at all uncommon these days for a publishing house to ask the author of a soon-to-be-released book to write a magazine or online article in the book’s voice, for promotional purposes, for instance.

Yes, I know; you want to concentrate on your writing, not its promotion. The muses love you for that impulse. But would you rather that I lied to you about the realities of being a working author?

I thought not.

What you should also not do — but, alas, all too many aspiring writers do — is attempt to replicate the voice of the book by lifting actual sentences from the novel itself. I know that you want to show off your best writing, but trust me, you’re going to want to make up some new verbiage here.

Why, you ask? Hint: people who go into the manuscript-reading business tend to have pretty good memories.

They recall what they’ve read.

See the problem, especially if — as not infrequently happens, especially with contest entries — the chapters containing the lifted verbiage and the synopsis are read back-to-back? A good 30% of contest synopses make this mistake, reproducing entire sentences or even entire paragraphs from the chapters included in the entry, invariably costing the entry originality points.

Do I see some raised hands from those of you who habitually recall what you’ve read? “But Anne,” I hear some of you pointing out, and who could blame you? “Didn’t you tell us just a couple of days ago that it was a grave error to assume that Millicent (the agency screener), Maury (her cousin who works as an editorial assistant), and/or Mehitabel (their aunt, the contest judge) will necessarily read both our synopses and the rest of our submissions?”

Excellent point, sharp-eyed readers. While it’s never safe to assume that EVERYONE who reads your synopsis will also read your opening chapter, it’s also not a very good idea to assume that NO ONE will. Shooting for a happy medium — including enough overlap that someone who read only one of them could follow the plot without indulging in phrase redundancy — tends to work best here.

Should you be tempted to repeat yourself, I implore you to ask this question with all possible speed: “Is there a vibrantly interesting detail that I could insert here instead?”

To over-writers (like, I must admit, myself), it may seem a trifle odd to suggest adding detail to a piece of writing as short as 5 pages, but actually, most synopses suffer from overgrowths of generalization and an insufficiency of specifics.

So once you have a solid draft, read it over and ask yourself: is what I have here honestly a reader-friendly telling of my story or a convincing presentation of my argument (don’t worry, NF writers: I’ll deal with your concerns at length next time), or is it merely a presentation of the premise of the book and a cursory overview of its major themes?

For most synopses, it is the latter.

Do I hear some questions over and above the wailing and gnashing of teeth out there? “But Anne,” a couple of voices crying from the wilderness, “How can I tell the difference between a necessary summary statement and a generalization?”

Again, excellent question. The short answer: it’s hard.

Here’s a useful trick: print up a hard copy of the synopsis, find yourself a highlighting pen, and mark every summary statement about character, every time you have wrapped up a scene or plot twist description with a sentence along the lines of and in the process, Sheila learns an important lesson about herself.

Go back through and take a careful look at these highlighted lines. Then ask yourself for each: would a briefly-described scene SHOW the conclusion stated there better than just TELLING the reader about it? Is there a telling character detail or an interesting plot nuance that might supplement these general statements, making them more interesting to read?

I heard that gasp of recognition out there — yes, campers, the all-pervasive directive to SHOW, DON’T TELL should be applied to synopses as well. Generally speaking, the fewer generalities you can use in a fiction synopsis, the better.

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

But a genuinely quirky detail in a particular synopsis — wouldn’t that stand out in your mind? And if that unique grabber appeared on page 1 of the synopsis, or even in the first couple of paragraphs, wouldn’t you pay more attention to the rest of the summary?

Uh-huh.

It’s very easy to forget in the heat of pulling together a synopsis that agency screeners are readers, too, not just decision-makers. They like to be entertained, so the more entertaining you can make your synopsis, the more likely Millicent is to be wowed by it. So are Maury and Mehitabel.

Isn’t it fortunate that you’re a writer with the skills to pull that off?

If your synopsis has the opposite problem and runs long, you should also sit down and read it over with a highlighter gripped tightly in your warm little hand. On your first pass through, mark any sentence that does not deal with the primary plot or argument of the book.

Then go back through and read the UNMARKED sentences in sequence, ignoring the highlighted ones. Ask yourself honestly: does the shorter version give an accurate impression of the book?

If so — take a deep breath here, please; some writers will find the rest of this paragraph upsetting — do the marked sentences really need to be there at all?

If your synopsis still runs too long, try this trick of the pros: minimize the amount of space you devote to the book’s premise and the actions that occur in Chapter 1; the vast majority of synopses spend to long on it. Here’s a startling statistic: in the average novel synopsis, over a quarter of the text deals with premise and character introduction.

Try trimming this down to just a few sentences and moving on to the rest of the plot.

If this seems to you like a dangerous strategy to embrace in what is, after all, a marketing document, think about it: if the agent or editor asked to see Chapter 1 or the first 50 pages, and if you place the chapter BEFORE the synopsis in your submission packet, the reader will already be familiar with both the initial premise AND the basic characters AND what occurs at the beginning in the book.

So why be repetitious?

Let me show you how this might play out in practice. Let’s continue this series’ tradition of pretending that you are Jane Austen, pitching SENSE AND SENSIBILITY to an agent at a conference. (Which I suspect would be a pretty tough sell in the current market, actually.)

Let’s further assume that you gave a solid, professional pitch, and the agent is charmed by the story. (Because, no doubt, you were very clever indeed, and did enough solid research before you signed up for your agent appointment to have a pretty fair certainty that this particular agent is habitually charmed by this sort of story.) The agent asks to see a synopsis and the first 50 pages.

See? Advance research really does pay off.

Naturally, you dance home in a terrible rush to get those pages in the mail. As luck would have it, you already have a partially-written synopsis on your computer. In it, the first 50 pages’ worth of action look something like this:

Now, all of this does in fact occur in the first 50 pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, at least in my well-worn little paperback addition. However, all of the plot shown above would be in the materials the agent requested, right? Do you really need to spend 2 of your allotted 5 pages on this small a section of the plot, even if it is the set-up for what happens later on?

Of course not. Being a wise Aunt Jane, you would streamline this portion of your submission synopsis so it looked a bit more like this:

And then go on with the rest of the story, of course.

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

While all of you novelists are hard at work, trying to perform a similar miracle upon your synopses, next time, I shall be tackling the specialized problems of the nonfiction synopsis. Yes, that’s right: we’re going to have our cake and eat it, too.

Oh, you didn’t honestly believe you’d make it through my birthday without being subjected to another bad cake pun, did you? Keep up the good work!

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Synopsis-writing 101, part V: stretching your limbs…well, a little

So far in this series, I’ve been going over prepping a synopsis for tucking inside a query envelope, adding to the partial an agent has requested that you send, plopping into a contest entry, or having at the ready in anticipation for such a request at a pitch meeting. For the last few posts, I’ve been concentrating upon that bane of writers everywhere, the 1-page synopsis, which is essentially a written-down verbal pitch.

The summary part of a pitch, anyway. A 1-page synopsis needs to be a quick, pithy introduction to the premise, the protagonist, and the central conflict of the book.

Piece o’ proverbial cake to do all that within a single page in standard format, right?

By contrast, the 5-page novel synopsis — which, until fairly recently, was far and away the most common requested length, as it still is for those already signed with agents and/or working with editors at publishing houses — should tell the STORY of your book (or state its argument) in as much vivid, eye-catching detail as you may reasonably cram into so few pages.

Why? To make the agent, editor, or contest judge reading it exclaim spontaneously, “Wow — this sounds like one terrific book; this writer is a magnificent storyteller.”

Again, piece of cake, right?

Don’t shrug, please, if you are not yet at the querying stage — as with the author bio, I strongly recommend getting your synopsis ready WELL before you anticipate needing it. Especially if you are intending to query or pitch at a conference anytime soon. As I MAY have mentioned before, you will be SUBSTANTIALLY happier if you walk into any marketing situation with your synopsis already polished, all ready to send out to the first agent or editor who asks for it, rather than running around in a fearful dither after the request, trying to pull your submission packet together.

(Wait — I have nagged you some time in the recent past about prepping an author bio, haven’t I? Off to check the archives…oh, dear; it’s been quite some time. Perhaps, after I polish off this series and take that long-anticipated plunge back into craft for at least a few weeks, I shall take another run at it.)

Even if you think that both of the reasons I have just given are, to put it politely, intended to help lesser mortals not anywhere near as talented than your good self, whatever you do, try not to save writing your synopsis for the very last moments before you stuff a submission or entry into an envelope. That route virtually guarantees uncaught mistakes, even for the most gifted of writers and savviest of self-promoters.

If you take nothing else away from this series, please remember this: writing a synopsis well is hard, even for the most seasoned of pros; be sure to budget adequate time for it.

If the task feels overwhelming — which would certainly be understandable, faced with the daunting task of summarizing a 400-page book in just a few well-written pages — remind yourself that even though it may feel as though you effectively need to reproduce the entire book in condensed format, you actually don’t.

Yes, you read that correctly: even a comparatively long synopsis shouldn’t depict every twist and turn of the plot — just strive to give a solid feel of the mood of the book and a basic plot summary. Show where the major conflicts lie, introduce the main characters, interspersed with a few scenes described with a wealth of sensual detail, to make it more readable.

Or, to return to our list of goals from a few days back:

(1) introduce the major characters and premise,

(2) demonstrate the primary conflict(s),

(3) show what’s at stake for the protagonist, and

(4) ideally, give some indication of the tone and voice of the book.

(5) show the primary story arc through BRIEF descriptions of the most important scenes. (For NF that isn’t story-based, present the planks of the overarching argument in logical order, along with some indication of how you intend to prove each point), and

(6) show how the plot’s primary conflict is resolved or what the result of adopting the book’s argument would be.

I sense some squirming from the summary-resistant out there. “But Anne,” I hear some of you protest, “what you’re suggesting sounds a heck of a lot like sitting down and summarizing the book!”

Not really — not if you winnow the story down to its most essential elements, rather than trying to list everything that happens. If you’re having trouble doing that — and at the risk of sounding like your last English literature teacher — set the actual happenings of the novel aside for a moment and think about its themes.

Oh, stop rolling your eyes; most authors are delighted to analyze their own books. Pretend that your book has just been assigned in a college English class — what would you expect the students to be able to say about it on the final?

I’m quite serious about this. Asking yourself the scant handful of questions that would turn up on an exam will help you identify the essentials. A few quiz questions, to get you started:

(a) Who is the protagonist, and why is s/he interesting? (You’d be astonished at how few novel synopses give any clear indication of the latter.) To put it another way, what about this character in this situation is fresh?

(b) What does s/he want more than anything else? What or who is standing in the way of getting it?

(c) Why is getting it so important to her/him? What will happen if s/he doesn’t get it?

(d) How does the protagonist grow and change throughout pursuing this goal? What are the most important turning points in her/his development?

(e) How does the protagonist achieve this goal?

See? Piece of proverbial…wait just a minute! Why, those questions sound a mite familiar, don’t they?

They should: they’re the underlying issues of goals 1-3 and 5-6, above. If you answer them in roughly the same voice as the book, you will have met goal #4, as well — and, almost without noticing it, you will have the basic material for a dandy synopsis.

Piece o’ cake, right?

Don’t, I implore you, make the extremely common mistake of leaving out point #6 — the one that specifies that you should include the ending. Too many aspiring writers do this in a misguided endeavor to goad Millicent the agency screener and her ilk into a frenzy of wonder about what is going to happen next.

“But I want to make them want to read the book!” such strategists invariably claim. “I don’t want to give away the ending. Leaving the synopsis on a cliffhanger will make them ask to see it right away.”

To professional eyes, this is a rookie mistake, at least in a synopsis longer than a page or two.

Why? Well, from their point of view, part of the goal of an extended synopsis, after all, is to demonstrate to someone who presumably hasn’t sat down and read your entire book that you can in fact plot out an entire novel plausibly. Agents and editors regard it as the writer’s job to demonstrate this in an extended synopsis, not theirs to guess how the plot might conceivably come to a halt.

I hate to be the one to break it to you (at least before I’ve helped you all to a slice of cake), but a talented sentence-writer’s possessing the skills, finesse, and tenacity to follow a story to its logical conclusions is not a foregone conclusion. In fact, in practice, the assumption tends to run in the opposite direction: if the synopsis leaves out the how the plot resolves, Millicent and her cousin Maury (the editorial assistant at a major publishing house) will tend to leap to one of four conclusions, none of which are good for a submitter. Either, they surmise:

a) the synopsis’ author isn’t aware of the purpose of an extended synopsis, and thus is a fish that should be thrown back into the sea until it grows up a little. In other words, next!

b) the synopsis’ author is a tireless self-promoter and/or inveterate tease, determined not to cough up the goods until there is actual money on the table. Since this is not how the publishing industry works, the fish analogy above may reasonably be applied. Next!

c) the synopsis’ author is probably one of the many, many writers exceptionally talented at coming up with stupendous premises, but less adept at fleshing them out. S/he evidently hopes to conceal this weakness from Millicent and Maury until after they have already fallen in love with the beauty of her/his prose and plotting in the early part of the book, in an attempt to cajole their respective bosses into editing the heck out of the novel before it could possibly be ready to market. The wily fiend!

d) or, less charitably, the synopsis’ author hasn’t yet written the ending, and thus is wasting their respective boss’ time by submitting an incomplete novel. Again, next!

Include some indication of how the plot resolves. Millicent, Maury, and their Aunt Mehitabel (the veteran contest judge) will thank you for it.

They might even give you a piece of that delicious cake I keep mentioning.

And yes, I do seem to have cake on my mind today, but for very good reason: tomorrow is my birthday. (And Truman Capote’s, as it happens.) I’m going to sign off for now, so I have time to pen a little treat for you all to have tomorrow while I am blowing out my candles.

How many? That’s for my memoir’s publishers to know, and you to find out if the legal issues around it are ever resolved. Keep up the good work!

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Synopsis-writing 101, part IV: the technicalities, or, what, you think I’m MADE of mushrooms?

Okay, so the joke in the title would have been funnier if I had in fact been posting on consecutive days, as I had originally planned. But as the illustrious comic Stephen Wright is fond of pointing out — you can’t have everything; where would you put it?

For the last couple of posts, I’ve been showing you examples of good and not-so-good 1-page synopses, so we could talk about (read: so I could conduct a monologue about) the overarching strategies that rendered them more or less effective. Since I haven’t exactly been overwhelmed with howls of protest on the subject — really? The prospect of constructing a 1-page synopsis for a 400-page novel of a complexity that would make Tolstoy weep annoys nobody? — I’m going to assume that we’re all pretty comfortable with the strategic part.

Before I move on to the ins and outs of writing the longer synopsis, I feel I should respond to some of the whimpers of confusion from the more structurally-minded of my readers. “But Anne,” I have heard some of you pointing out, “you’ve shown us a couple of visual examples of properly-formatted synopses — a sort of SYNOPSES ILLUSTRATED, if you will. Any chance that you might go over the various rather odd-looking formatting choices you’ve used in them before, say, we need to send out our own?”

Oh, certainly. Let’s take another example at the good 1-page synopsis for PRIDE AND PREJUDICE:

For veterans of any of my extended forays into the joys and terrors of standard format for manuscripts, nothing here should be too surprising. By and large, standard format for a synopsis is the same as for a page of manuscript: double-spaced, 1-inch margins all around, indented paragraphs, Times, Times New Roman, or Courier, the works. (If you’re unfamiliar with the rules of standard format, you will find them conveniently summarized in the HOW TO FORMAT A MANUSCRIPT and STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED categories on the list at right.

Please notice that, as with the first page of a manuscript, the author’s contact information does not appear on the first page of the synopsis. Unlike the first page of a manuscript, however, the title of the book should appear on the first page of a synopsis, along with the information that it IS a synopsis.

Why the latter? Because the synopsis and the manuscript it accompanies — to say nothing of the synopsis and query that often arrive in the same envelope — often become separated during the reading and evaluation process. It never pays to assume, then, that the reader of one will automatically know things about the other.

The title, for instance.

A second (or third, or fifth; extrapolate) page should also look very similar to any other page of standard-formatted manuscript, with one vital exception: the slug line for a synopsis should, as I mentioned in the previous sentence, SAY that the page it decorates is from a synopsis, not a manuscript, in addition to displaying the author’s last name, the title of the book, and the page number. (If you don’t know what a slug line is, why anyone would use it, or, indeed, why anyone would name something on a pretty page of text after a slimy creature, please see the SLUG LINE category on the list at right.)

Why include a slug line here? Because pages do occasionally go astray, and because synopses, like manuscripts, should never be bound in any way — unless a contest’s rules specifically state otherwise, of course.

Do I hear some nervous shifting in chairs out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you cry out, “aren’t you ignoring the elephant in the room — or, in this case, on the page? You seem to have given some of the character names in all capital letters. Why?”

I’m glad you asked. It’s not absolutely necessary, technically speaking, but most professional fiction synopses CAPITALIZE THE ENTIRE NAME of each major character the first time it appears. Not every time, mind you; just the first.

Why only the first? To alert a skimming agent or editor to the fact that — wait for it — a new character has just walked into the story.

Because Millicent might, you know, miss ’em otherwise.

It is also considered pretty darned nifty (and word-count thrifty) to include the character’s age in parentheses immediately after the first time the name appears, resulting in synopses that look something like this:

ST. THERESA OF AVILA (26) has a problem. Ever since she started dating multi-millionaire GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER (82), all of her friends have unaccountably decided that she is mercenary and hates Native Americans. Apart from JEANNE D’ARC (30), her wacky landlady-cum-bowling-partner, who uses every opportunity to pump Theresa for man-landing tips, none of the residents of Theresa’s swanky Upper East Side co-op are even speaking to her — at least until they start desperately vying for invitations to her exclusive wedding extravaganza, a lavish event to be held onstage at the Oscars, with THE REVEREND DOCTOR OWEN WILSON (44 if he’s a day, I would guess; Author! Author! hopes he feels better soon) officiating. How will Theresa find a maid of honor — and if she does, what will her jealous old boyfriend GOD (∞) do?

Should any of you out there think you’re up to rounding out the plot above into some measure of coherence and submitting it, please, be my guest. Really. I’d love to read it.

For the rest of you, please note what I have done here: in preparing a synopsis for a comedy, I have produced a — wait for it! — humorous treatment of the material.

And if I were creating a synopsis for a steamy romance novel with the same premise (although I tremble to think what a sex romp with that particular cast of characters would entail), you can bet your last wooden nickel [that] I would take some writerly steps to make my reader’s mouth go dry and his breath become short while perusing it.

Would I do this because I’m wacky? No, because — those of you who have been following this series, chant it with me now — the synopsis, like the first 50 pages, is a writing sample.

Oh, had I mentioned that before? Well, it cannot be said too often, in my opinion. The sensible writer’s primary goal in producing it is to demonstrate not only that it is a good (or at least marketable) story, an attention-grabbing yarn peopled with fascinating characters, but that the writer is a terrific storyteller.

Don’t worry — in the days to come, I shall be talking about ways in which you can tweak your synopsis in order to convey that lovely impression.

For the nonce, let’s take a quick field trip back to yesterday’s examples of a not-so-hot 1-page synopsis. Do you notice any formatting problems here?

If you immediately leapt to your feet, screaming, “It doesn’t have a slug line! It doesn’t have a slug line!” give yourself a gold star for the day. Further points if you bellowed that it doesn’t say anywhere on the page that it is a synopsis.

Extra credit if you noticed that the pages are not numbered — a major no-no in any submission, ever, yet one of the more common ones. And yes, you should number it, even for a one-page synopsis — and no, you should not number it consecutively with the manuscript, unless a contest rule’s SPECIFICALLY tell you to do so. The first page of a synopsis is always page 1.

Top yourself with a halo if you also discovered that Aunt Jane made the rookie mistake of adding her name to the synopsis anywhere but in the slug line. For book-length works, the first page of text — regardless of whether it is in the manuscript, the synopsis, or any other requested materials — is not a title page.

Don’t treat it as if it were one; it looks unprofessional to the pros.

Everyone happy with his or her score on that quiz? Let’s take on the other negative example:

Where do we even begin? Millicent the screener would almost certainly not even read this one — in fact, she might burst into laughter from several paces away.

Let’s go over why. It stars too far down on the page, for one thing, falling into the same title-page error as the previous example. It’s the over-the-top typeface, though, and the fact that the page uses more than one of them, that would set Millicent giggling and showing it to her coworkers.

Oh, and it doesn’t contain a slug line or numbering. But I doubt Millicent would even notice that over her guffaws.

It makes one other error for a fiction synopsis, a subtler one — any guesses what?

This one may surprise some of you: it mentions the title of the book IN the text of the synopsis. Why is this a problem? Well, it’s considered stylistically weak, a sign that the synopsis is talking ABOUT the book instead of getting the reader involved in the story. Or, to put it another way, and a bit more bluntly: a fiction synopsis is supposed to tell the story of the book; one that pulls the reader out of the story by talking about it at a distance tends not to do that well.

And anyway, the title is already both at the top of the page (and SHOULD be in the slug line): why, Millicent wonders impatiently, cradling her too-hot latte until it cools — she’s learning, she’s learning — would the writer WANT to waste the space and her time by repeating the information?

“Wait just a minute, Anne,” I hear some of my former questioners call from the rear of the auditorium. “You’re talking about the cosmetic aspects of the synopsis as though it were going to be judged as pitilessly as the manuscript I submit. Surely, that’s not the case? The synopsis is just a technical requirement, right?”

Um, no — as I said, it’s considered a WRITING SAMPLE. So yes, it does tend to be judged — and dismissed — just as readily as problematic text anywhere else in the submission packet.

Sorry to be the one to break that to you. But isn’t it better that you hear it from me than surmise it from a form-letter rejection? Or, as is more often the case, NOT surmise if from a form-letter rejection and keep submitting problematic synopses?

Something worth mulling over, I think.

Next time, we’ll leave technicalities behind and delve into the wonderful world of storytelling on the fly. Keep up the good work!

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Synopsis-writing 101, part III, or, when brevity isn’t the soul of wit

The universe is full of unanswered questions lately, I notice. What is the origin of evil, for instance? Why didn’t I follow up on Tuesday’s rather exciting (I thought) post on 1-page synopsis-writing with an equally thrilling one yesterday — or indeed, post yesterday at all? And why oh why do I seem to associate synopses with mushrooms?

Some doors man was not meant to open.

Last time, I let the cat out of the bag, all right: I divulged the secret that just because many different people — agents, editors, contest rule-writers, fellowship committees, etc. — use the term synopsis, it does not mean that they are necessarily all talking about an identical document. Different individuals, agencies, and institutions want different lengths, so it always behooves an aspiring writer to double-check the requirements.

Being an intrepid soul, I jumped right in and tackled the most feared of such requests, the single-page synopsis. Unlike a longer synopsis, where the writer actually is expected to provide an overview of the book in question’s plot or argument, a 1-page synopsis is essentially a teaser for the book, intended only to perform a limited number of functions.

What functions, you ask? Well may you ask, because now that I cast my eye back over Tuesday’s post, I notice that I might have presented them in a slightly clearer fashion. As in, for example, list format:

(1) introduce the major characters and premise,

(2) demonstrate the primary conflict(s),

(3) show what’s at stake for the protagonist, and

(4) ideally, give some indication of the tone and voice of the book.

This goal should sound very, very familiar to those of you who made the hard trek through my recent series on verbal pitches. In both cases, the purpose is not to tell everything there is to tell about the book — these formats are simply too short to permit that — but to give the reader/hearer enough of a taste to whet his or her appetite.

In case I’m being too subtle here, you’re trying to get the agent reading it to ask to see the manuscript, not provide so much information that reading it would be redundant. Everybody clear on that?

Actually, this isn’t a bad list of goals for any length synopsis — certainly, it’s more than most that cross our pal Millicent’s desk actually achieve. However, for a longer synopsis — say, the 5-page version most frequently requested by agents, or a slightly shorter one intended for contest submission — I would add to the list:

(5) show the primary story arc through BRIEF descriptions of the most important scenes. (For NF that isn’t story-based, present the planks of the overarching argument in logical order, along with some indication of how you intend to prove each point), and

(6) show how the plot’s primary conflict is resolved or what the result of adopting the book’s argument would be.

Does that sound like an overwhelming set of tasks to pull off in a few short pages? I can see how it might feel that way, but to continue my newfound tradition of bluntness, the vast majority of synopsis-writers attempt to do far, far more.

How so? Well, the first time you tried to write a synopsis, didn’t you try to tell the entire story of the book?

I shall take that giant-sized sigh of disgusted recognition as a yes — and if I had to guess (do I? Do I? Apparently, I do), I would wager that those of you who DIDN’T answer that question in the affirmative have not yet tried to write a synopsis.

At least, not since you learned what they were for; I’m not talking about those oh-so-common soi-disant synopses that don’t summarize the book so much as promote it. (This is the best novel since MIDDLEMARCH, only less depressing!) But of that pitfall, more follows anon.

If you find the necessity for brevity intimidating, you are hardly alone; I am perpetually meeting aspiring writers agonizing over it. Case in point: about five years ago, I met a marvelous writer at a conference; naturally, as conference etiquette demands, I asked her over crawfish etouffée what her first novel was about.

Forty-three minutes and two excellently-becreamed courses later, she came to the last scene.

“That sounds like a great novel,” I said, waving away a waiter bent upon stuffing me until I burst. “And I really like that it’s an easy one to pitch: two women, misfits by personality and disability within their own families and communities, use their unlikely friendship to forge new bonds of identity in a lonely world.”

The author stared at me, as round-eyed as if I had just sprouted a second head. “How did you do that? I’ve been trying to come up with a one-sentence summary for two years!”

Of course, it was easier for me than for her: I have years of experience crafting pitches; it’s a learned skill. Still more importantly, because I had not yet read the book, I did not know the subtle character nuances that filled her pages. I could have no knowledge of how she had woven perspective with perspective in order to tease the reader into coming to know the situation fully. I was not yet aware of the complex ways in which she made language dance. All I knew was the premise and the plot – which put me in an ideal position to come up with a pithy, ready-for-the-conference-floor pitch.

Or — and I can feel that some of you have already jumped ahead to the next logical step here — a synopsis.

This is why, I explained to her, I always write the pitch before I write the piece. Less distracting that way. You can always tweak it down the road, but why not get the basic constituent parts on paper first, while the plot elements are still painted in broad strokes in your head?

Ditto for synopses. Naturally, they will evolve as the book develops and the plot thickens in writing, but I’ve never known a writer who could not easily give a one-page synopsis of her book when she was two weeks into writing it — and have seldom known the same author to be able to do so without agony a year later.

Those of you locked in mid-novel can feel what I’m about to suggest coming, can’t you?

That lump in the pit of your stomach is not lying to you: I am seriously suggesting that you sit down and write at least a concise summary of the major themes of the book — if not actually a provisional 1-page synopsis (and, to be on the safe side, a 5-page one as well) — BEFORE you finish writing it.

At least a rough draft: you’ll have more time to tweak later on, and in the long run, if you multi-task throughout the creation process, your work will hit the agent market faster.

How so? Well, think how much happier you will be on the blessed day that an agent asks you for one. Wouldn’t you rather be able to say, “Sure; I’ll get that out to you right away,” instead of piping through mounting terror, “Wow, um, I guess I could pull one together and send it with the chapter you requested…”

Synopses, like pitches, are often easier to write for a book that has not yet come to life. At the beginning of the writing process, it is easy to be succinct: there are not yet myriad plot details and marvelous twists to get in the way of talking about the premise.

Everyone who has ever sighed in response to the ubiquitous question, “Gee, what is your book about?” knows this to be true, right?

As I mentioned earlier in this series, too many aspiring writers seem to forget that the synopsis is a writing sample, too — and will be judged accordingly. A panicked state is not, I have noticed, the most conducive to smooth summarization.

One common mistake is to overload the synopsis with detail, instead of sticking to the major plot points. The result, in case you were wondering, tends to look a little something like this:

Contrast that, if you please, with the solid 1-page synopsis for the same book we discussed yesterday:

The difference is pretty stark, isn’t it? At the rate that the first example is crawling, it would almost be quicker to read the manuscript itself.

I heard you think that: no, Millicent will NOT immediately turn to a manuscript if she finds a synopsis unsatisfying. In the rather unlikely circumstance that she reads the synopsis first (screeners tend to pounce upon the first page of text right away, to see if they like the writing, then move on to a requested synopsis later), all a poorly-constructed synopsis is likely to impel her to do is reach for her already-prepared stack of form-letter rejections.

Sorry.

The other common panic response to the demand for brevity, particularly in a 1-page synopsis, is to turn it into a projected back jacket blurb for the book. Contest judges see this all the time: the requested synopsis is, after all, not all that much longer than a standard back jacket blurb, many contest entrants apparently think, so why not use it as an opportunity for promotional copy?

The result, alas, tends to be a series of vague generalities and unsupported boasts, looking a little something like this:

Yes, I know that there’s a typo in the last paragraph, smarty pants — and I sincerely hope that you caught some of the many standard format violations as well. For the moment, though, let’s set cosmetic matters on the back burner and look at the content. Setting aside the most important writing distinction between these three examples — the third TELLS that the book is good, whereas the the second and third SHOW that why it might be appealing through specifics — let’s stick to basics here.

So let me ask you: how well does each fulfill the criteria for 1-page synopsis success that we established above? To recap:

(1) introduce the major characters and premise,

(2) demonstrate the primary conflict(s),

(3) show what’s at stake for the protagonist, and

(4) ideally, give some indication of the tone and voice of the book.

Obviously, the last example fails in almost every respect. It does (1) introduce a few of the main characters and part of the premise, but dumbs it down: Lizzy seems to be the passive pawn of Mr. Wickham, and not too bright to boot. It mentions (2) one of the conflicts, but neither the most important nor the first of the book, but it entirely misses the book’s assessment of (3) what’s at stake for Lizzy (other than the implied possibility of falling in love with the wrong man).

Most seriously, (4) this blurb pretty actively misrepresents the tone and voice of the book, presenting it as a torrid romance rather than a comedy of manners. Why is this a mistake? Well, think about it: would an agent who represents steamy romances be a good fit for PRIDE AND PREJUDICE? Would s/he be likely to have the editorial connections to place it under the right eyes quickly?

And when you come right down to it, isn’t an agent who gets excited about the book described here likely to be disappointed by the opening pages of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE?

Example #1 — what I like to call the run-on synopsis — performs better, doesn’t it? It presents both (1) the characters and premise fairly well, but in getting sidetracked by a minor conflict, its writer rapidly runs out of room to present the (2) primary conflict of the book. By focusing so exclusively on what happens, rather than upon establishing, say, the protagonist’s motivations and desires, it underplays (3) what’s at stake for her.

Isn’t it interesting, though, how little actual quotation from the book (as I’ve done several times throughout) helps demonstrate the tone and voice of the book? It’s one of the great comedies of the English language — shouldn’t this synopsis be FUNNY?

The middle example — the one that, if you will recall, is little more than a reformatted and slightly expanded version of the summary portion of a 2-minute pitch — succeeds in fulfilling each of our goals. Or perhaps it would be more productive if I asked that as a question: DOES it? Can you think of ways to improve upon it without extending it beyond a single page?

Quick, now: Aunt Jane needs to know immediately, because the agent of her dreams asked her today to send the first 50 pages and a synopsis, and she’s just about to finish printing up the former. Can you pick up the pace of revision, please?

See how much harder it is when you’re trying to do it in a hurry? Wouldn’t it be nice if Aunt Jane already had a synopsis on hand to send?

I know, I know: it’s exceedingly tempting to procrastinate for as long as you possibly can about embarking upon a task as difficult and as potentially annoying as this, but working on the synopsis well before anyone in the industry might reasonably ask to see it guarantees that yours will have a significant advantage over the vast majority that cross Millicent’s desk: it won’t have been tossed together at the last possible nanosecond before sealing the submission packet.

The results, as Millie herself would be the first to tell you, are not always pretty. Your manuscript deserves better treatment than that, doesn’t it?

I’ll leave you chewing on all of these big issues for the nonce. Next time, we’re going to be returning to these same examples with a more technical eye, to see how the smaller structural and presentation issues play into a synopsis’ success.

Keep up the good work!

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While I’m at it, let’s go ahead and talk about how to put together a submission packet

After I signed off yesterday, I began to experience a qualm or two: yes, I had gone over how to use a SASE (that pesky self-addressed, stamped envelope queriers and submitters are expected to tuck into their queries and submissions), but had I really said enough about what should and should not go into a submission packet? Had I, in fact, explained it all clearly enough that a reader wrapped up in the dizzying excitement of receiving her first request to submit pages could skim it (when trying to get a manuscript out the door, who has time for deep reading?), comprehend it, and slap together a bang-up submission packet on the spot, without digging into the archives?

And the ghostly voices in the ether I choose to attribute to my readers moaned, “No…”

In short, I think it’s worth delaying my promised series on synopsis-writing a day or so in order to round out our discussion of all things mailed, don’t you?

I’m choosing to take all of the silence out there as a yes. Let’s pretend for a moment that like my fantasy reader above, you have just been asked to submit materials to the agent of your dreams.

To be absolutely clear, I’m not talking about sending pages to an agency that asks queriers to include the first chapter, a few pages, or a synopsis with a query — all of these would, in the industry’s eyes, be unsolicited pages. I know; it’s a bit counter-intuitive that a blanket statement that the agent would like to see these materials from all queriers doesn’t constitute solicitation, but it doesn’t.

A solicited submission is one that an agent is WAITING to see, usually following a successful pitch or query.

Let’s further assume that your manuscript (or whatever portion of it an agent or editor has requested that you send to be perused by Millicent, the Platonic agency screener) is already in tip-top formatting shape, all typos and logic problems removed, and thus what the industry calls clean — and if you’re not absolutely positive that your pages meet ALL of those conditions, stop right here and make a plan for tidying up your pages.

Trust me, this is a situation where spelling counts. As does grammar.

But once your work is in apple-pie order, as Louisa May Alcott used to say, what next? What should your submission packet include, and in what order?

In part, this is a trick question, because — long-time readers, chant it with me now — the packet should include precisely what the agent asked you to include, no more, no less. In the words of the immortal Fats Waller, find out what they like and how they like it, and let ‘em have it just that way.

Okay, so he wasn’t talking about literature when he sang that. Roll with me here.

Agents are usually quite specific about what they want in a submission. If you doubt this, check out an agency’s website or one of the standard agency guides, then attend a conference where agents are scheduled to speak. Raise your hand and ask whether it’s okay to send, say, the 55 pages it would take to round out a chapter when an agent has asked to see the first 50. You will be astonished at how people who say their preferences in clients are as vague as writers who produce “good writing in any genre” will suddenly transform into rule-hugging lovers of draconian efficiency.

To save you the trouble of asking, let me tell you what they will say: never, ever, EVER send what you THINK they want to see instead of what they have asked to see. Of course, you may offer in your cover letter to send more, but that is all.

Which means, in practice, that if you’ve been asked for the first 50, and the chapter ends in a blow-your-socks-off cliffhanger on p. 51, you should still only send the first 50. Of course, if you wanted to be Machiavellian about it, you could always perform a little strategic snipping prior to that, so said cliffhanger topples just on the bottom of p. 50. No one would fault you for that.

However — and this should sound familiar on the secret handshake front — any agent is going to assume that a writer of your caliber is already aware that certain requests imply certain inclusions. Here they are, in the order in which they are generally expected to appear in the packet:

1. Cover letter
An astonishingly high percentage of submissions arrive without a cover letter, and often without a title page as well, begging the question: what makes these writers so positive that the requesting agent will still remember their queries or pitches well enough to render page one of chapter one instantly recognizable?

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but it’s not going to be — in fact, in many agencies, the person who heard the pitch or read the query won’t even be the first person to screen the submission. So it doesn’t really make sense to assume that everyone who sets eyes on your manuscript will already be familiar with your work.

Besides, including a cover letter is polite. No need for a long-winded missive — a simple thank-you to the agent for having asked to see the materials enclosed will do.

If you met the agent at a conference, mention that in the first paragraph of the letter, to help place your submission in context. (As crushing as it may be to the writerly ego to contemplate, an agent who spent days on end listening to hundreds of pitches probably is not going to remember each one. No need to re-pitch, but a gentle reminder never hurts.

If another agent is already reading all or part of the manuscript you’re sending — or has asked to see it — mention this in your cover letter. No need to say who it is or how long s/he has had it; just tell the recipient that s/he’s not the only one considering representing this book. Unless the agency has a policy forbidding simultaneous submissions, withholding this information will only generate resentment down the line if more than one agent wants to represent your book.

Yes, even if that agent to whom you submitted 9 months ago has just never responded. Actually, it’s in your strategic interest to contact that non-responder to let her know that another agent is interested.

Most importantly, make sure ALL of your contact information is on the letter, either in the header (letterhead-style) or under your signature, and do be absolutely certain that the letter includes the title of your book, just in case the letter and the manuscript end up on different desks.

Yes, it does happen. You want them to be able to get ahold of you to tell you how much they love your writing, don’t you?

2. Title page
ALWAYS include this, if ANY manuscript pages have been requested – yes, even if you have already sent the first 50 pages, and are now sending the rest of the book. (If you have never formatted a professional manuscript before, please see the YOUR TITLE PAGE category at right.)

Why? Long-time readers, chant it with me now: because the submission looks more professional that way.

Also, like the cover letter, the title page renders it easy for an agent to track you down. Believe me, if the agent of your dreams falls in love with your manuscript, you’re going to want to hear about it right away.

3. The requested pages in standard format.
Oh, please, don’t get me started again on the necessity of sending ONLY the pages the agents asked to see…or about the desirability of sending professionally-formatted manuscript pages. This time of year, when I have a lot of clients calling me up all excited because they’ve pitched successfully at a conference, the rules keep running through my head like a nagging tune.

If you’re new to reading this blog, or have somehow avoided my repeated and vehement posts on standard format for manuscripts, please see the HOW TO FORMAT A MANUSCRIPT and STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED categories on the list at right.

For the benefit of those of you who are going to blow off that last piece of advice because you’re in a hurry — oh, I know that you’re out there — allow me to add something you would have learned from those posts on formatting: a manuscript intended for submission should not be bound in any way.

Oh, and do use at least 20-lb, bright white paper. Cheaper paper can begin to wilt after the first screener has rifled through it. Yes, it does increase the already quite substantial cost of submission, but this is one situation where being penny-wise can cost you serious presentation points.

4. Synopsis, if one was requested, clearly labeled AS a synopsis.
With fiction, when an outline is requested, they usually mean a synopsis, not an annotated table of contents. For nonfiction, an outline means an annotated table of contents.

Most of the time, though, what an agent will ask to see for either is a synopsis.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, I haven’t done a synopsis how-to in a while, so I shall be revisiting it beginning this coming weekend. For those of you in a greater hurry, please check out the HOW TO WRITE A SYNOPSIS category at right. (How do I come up with these category titles?)

5. Author bio, if one was requested.
An author bio is a one-page (double-spaced) or half-page (single-spaced) plus photo account of the submitting writer’s professional credentials. Typically, when an agent submits a manuscript or book proposal to editors, the author Since these are far from easy to write, I always recommend that aspiring writers construct them well in advance, so they have a great one on hand to tuck into the submission packet.

I suspect that I’m going to yield to those nagging voices in the ether and revisit how to write an author bio soon — but dag nab it, I really want to get back to craft. For those of you who need to toss one together while this internal debate rages, you can find a step-by-step guide to writing one under the AUTHOR BIO category on the list at right.

6. A SASE big enough to fit the entire manuscript.
This should be automatic by now, but to recap for those of you who will read this weeks or months from now in the archives: that’s a self-addressed, stamped envelope, for those of you new to the game. Always use stamps, not metered postage, for the SASE.

Why? Because since 9/11, someone who wants to mail a pre-metered package that weighs over two pounds via USPS has to tote it to a post office. Due to the paper-consumptive rigors of standard format, one rarely, if ever, meets a full-length manuscript that weighs less than two pounds.

If you’ve been asked to submit an entire manuscript, rather than a partial, it is, as I mentioned yesterday, completely acceptable to ask the agency to reuse the original shipping box as the SASE. Include a return mailing label, already made out to you, the proper stamps for postage (metered strips will not work here), and add a paragraph to your cover letter explaining that you want them to reuse the box. To be on the safe side, explain HOW you want them to reuse the box: peel the back off the mailing label, stick it over the old label, affix new postage, and seal.

You didn’t hear it from me, of course, but sometimes, they evidently have trouble figuring it out.

7. Optional extras.
If you want to send a second, business-size envelope SASE as well, to make it easy for them to request the rest of the manuscript, place it at the bottom of the packet (and mention it in your cover letter.)

It’s also a good idea to include a self-addressed, stamped postcard for the agency to mail to you to acknowledge receipt of the manuscript. Don’t worry about this causing trouble; it doesn’t, and you will have proof that they received it. This is important, because manuscripts do go astray from time to time.

8. Pack it all in a durable container that will keep your submission from getting damaged en route.
I hear all the time from writers stressing out about what kind of box to use, and not without good reason. In the old days — say, 30+ years ago — the author was expected to provide a box, and a rather nice one, then wrap it in plain brown paper for shipping. These old boxes are beautiful, if you can still find one: dignified black cardboard, held together by shining brass brads.

However, now, if you can get the requested materials there in one piece box-free (say, if it is an excerpt short enough to fit into a Manila folder or Priority Mail cardboard envelope), go ahead. Do bear in mind, though, that you want to have your pages arrive looking fresh and unbent, so make sure that your manuscript fits comfortably in its holder in such a way that the pages are unlikely to wrinkle.

Remember my comment above about its being penny-wise and pound-foolish to use cheap paper for submissions? This is part of the reason why.

Or, to put it another way: if your submission is the next one opened immediately after Millicent has burned her lip on that latté that she never seems to remember to let cool, do you think you’ll be better off if the pages are slightly mangled, or if they are smooth?

Yeah. Appearances count.

For an entire manuscript, find an inexpensive box. You’re going to want a box with the right footprint to ship a manuscript without too much internal shifting. Going a little big and adding peanuts or bubble wrap is usually your best bet. (Avoid the temptation to use newspaper; newsprint stains.)

Most office supply stores carry perfectly serviceable white boxes, but if you live in the greater Seattle area, funky plastic junk store Archie McPhee’s, of all places, routinely carries fabulous red and blue boxes exactly the right size for a 450-page manuscript WITH adorable little black plastic handles for about a buck each. AND you can get a bobble-head Edgar Allan Poe doll that bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to Robert Goulet — and if that’s not one-stop shopping, I should like to know what is.

Your local post office will probably stock manuscript-sized boxes as well. Do be warned, though, that the USPS’ 8 1/2” x 11” boxes only LOOK as though they will fit a manuscript comfortably without bunching the pages. the actual footprint of the bottom of the box is the size of a piece of paper, so there is no wiggle room to, say, insert a stack of paper without wrinkling it.

Trust me, that’s NOT something you want to find out after you’ve already printed out your submission.

Yes, yes, I know: the USPS is purportedly the best postal service in the world, a boon to humanity, and one of the least expensive to boot. Their gallant carriers have been known to push forward through the proverbial sleet, hail, dark of night, and mean dogs. But when faced with an only apparently manuscript-ready box on a last-minute deadline, the thought must occur to even the most flag-proud: do the postal services of other countries confound their citizens in this way? What do they expect us to put in an 8 1/2” x 11” box OTHER than a manuscript?

Okay, that’s out of my system now. But whatever difficulties you may have finding an appropriately-sized box, DO NOT, under any circumstances, reuse a box clearly marked for some other purpose, such as holding dishwashing soap.

Yes, it’s been known to happen.

The most economical box source for US-based writers are those free Priority Mail boxes that the post office provides, the ones that are about 2 inches deep. They’ll actually hold two 400-page manuscripts side-by-side quite comfortably, so add padding to keep the unbound manuscripts from bouncing around too much. I want it to look good when it gets there, after all.

Since it would be impracticable to fold up another Priority Mail box inside, I advise enclosing the label and postage, as I described above, or just nabbing one of those tough little everything-you-can-cram-in-here-is-one-price Priority Mail envelopes, self-addressing it, adding postage, and sticking it into the box.

If you don’t care if your manuscript comes back to you a little bent, this is a wonderfully cash-conscious way to go. Those envelopes are surprisingly tough, in my experience — what are they made out of, kryptonite? — and while the pages don’t look too pretty after a cross-country trip in them, they do tend to arrive safely.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m not a big fan of writers over-investing in impressive return postage. It’s bad enough that we writers are expected to underwrite the costs of agencies rejecting our work (which is, effectively, what the SASE accomplishes, right?). If you’re getting the manuscript back, it’s because they’ve rejected it. Who cares if the pages show up on your doorstep bent?

Unless, of course, you intend to iron those pages and submit them somewhere else.

And that, my friends, is the low-down on the submission packet. Don’t forget that EVERYTHING you send to an agency is a writing sample: impeccable grammar, punctuation, and printing please. No smudges or bent corners, either. Make it all pretty.

Questions? Comments? Anyone up for a nice, long walk where we talk about something else entirely?

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 1 Comment on What should a query letter look like, anyway? Part II: the inevitable effects of competition at the feeding bowl

What should a query letter look like, anyway? Part II: the inevitable effects of competition at the feeding bowl

As you may see, this summer’s litter of wee raccoonlets (I’d call them cubs, but the term fails to convey the relevant cuteness) have found our outdoor cat’s food bowl. In broad daylight, no less, with the kitty in question regarding them with singular disfavor from a few scant feet away. Since we fed the babies’ mother when she was a cub, and her parents when they were, I suppose I would be unreasonable to expect them to be shy. They scratch on my door when they’re hungry.

I don’t have a whole lot of leisure to watch them, unfortunately, because I’m still on relative hiatus (read: I’m writing this propped up on a couch, nearly buried in blankets, cats, and Kleenex, not the healthy person’s choice for stylish summer apparel), but by gum, I’m on the job. The task at hand: helping those of you new to constructing query letters learn to build a good one — and giving those of you who have been at it for a while some tips on making yours better.

To that end, my last couple of posts have been re-runs (yes, a bit lazy of me, but you try moving the cat who likes sleeping on top of my mousing arm) on what a query letter is and isn’t. For the rest of this week, I’m going to continue this trend — mostly, like today, combining some material from different past posts into fresh ones, then folding in some visuals. After we’re all good and clear on the basic concepts, I’ll move on to how to spot trouble spots in existing query letters. Sounds like fun, eh?

Well, okay, maybe not fun, but doesn’t it at least sound bearable?

At minimum, it should be exceedingly useful. Honest. Think of it as taking your query letter to the gym.

Now would be a great time to work on its muscle tone: for those of you who don’t know, most of the NYC-based publishing world goes on vacation from mid-August until after Labor Day. Throughout that sleepy, humid period, mail rooms back up and desks disappear under as-yet-to-be-read query letters and manuscripts, threatening to bury the lone, pale intern left behind to answer e-mails and phones (or, alternatively, the agent who likes to work uninterrupted, and thus took his vacation at some other time of year).

It’s not the best time to query or submit. Nor is immediately after Labor Day, when Millicent and her cronies return, groaning, to sort through that pile — if you picture the look on her face when she reappears in the office after the winter holidays, wincing at the sight of the thousands of envelopes sent by well-meaning keepers of New Year’s resolutions, you’re feeling the mood correctly.

Take a couple of weeks to polish your query or submission. Trust me, Millie will be in a better mood after the 10th or so.

Why — what a remarkable coincidence! I have a couple of weeks of query-burnishing posts planned. Why so many? Well, plenty of aspiring writers find the querying process quite intimidating.

And who can blame them, considering how short a query letter is supposed to be? “My God,” the little voice in the back of my head which I choose to attribute to you is saying, “how is all of that possible within the context of a single-page missive? How can I cram all I need to say to grab their attention in that little space?”

Um, are you sitting down? You don’t actually have the entire page to catch their attention; on average, you have about five lines.

Yes, you read that correctly.

While you already have the heart medication and/or asthma inhaler at the ready, it seems like a good time to add: most query letters are not even read to their ends by screeners.

Why? Because the vast majority of query letters disqualify themselves from serious consideration before the end of the opening paragraph.

Hey, I told you to sit down first.

Unfortunately, Americans are so heavily exposed to hard-sell techniques that many aspiring writers make the mistake of using their query letters to batter the agent with predictions of future greatness so over-inflated (and, from the agent’s point of view, so apparently groundless, coming from a previously unpublished writer) that they may be dismissed out of hand. Some popular favorites:

“This is the next (fill in name of bestseller here)!”
“You’ll be sorry if you let this one pass by!”
“Everyone in the country will want to read this book!”
“It’s a natural for Oprah!”
“This book is like nothing else on the market!”

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but to professional eyes, these are all absurd statements to find in a query letter. Yes, even if the book in question IS the next DA VINCI CODE.

Why? Because these aren’t descriptions of the book; they’re back-jacket blurbs, marketing copy, equally applicable to (and equally likely to be true about) any manuscript that crosses their desks. Even in the extremely rare instances that these statements aren’t just empty boasts based upon wishful thinking, consider: whose literary opinion would YOU be more likely to believe in Millicent’s shoes, the author’s vague claim of excellence about his own book or another reader’s recommendation?

Hitting too close to home? Okay, let me put it this way: if someone you’d never met before came up to you on the street and said, “Hey, I bake the world’s best mincemeat pies, the kind that can change your life in a single bite,” would you believe him? Would you trustingly place that total stranger’s good-looking (or not) slice of God-knows-what into your mouth? Or would you want some assurances that, say, this hard-selling Yahoo knows something about cooking, had produced the pie in a vermin-free kitchen, and/or hadn’t constructed the mincemeat out of ground-up domestic pets?

Oh, you may laugh, thinking that this isn’t really an apt parallel, but what is agents and editors’ desire to hear about a new writer’s past publication history — or educational background, or even platform — about, if NOT to try to figure out if that pie is made of reasonable materials and in a manner up to professional standards of production?

That’s why, in case you’ve been wondering, a good query letter includes what I like to call ECQLC, Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy. Not because agencies are determined to seem exclusionary toward previously unpublished writers (okay, not merely to seem exclusionary), but because specific references to specific past literary achievements are signals to a quick-scanning screener that this is a query letter to take seriously.

As will an opening paragraph that states clearly and concisely why the writer decided to query this agent, as opposed to any other; a well-crafted single-paragraph elevator speech for the book; some indication of the target market, and a polite, respectful tone — the same basic elements, in short, as an effective verbal pitch.

Did some light bulbs just flicker on over some heads out there? That’s right, campers — the difference between a vague boast and solid information about your book and why THIS agent is the best fit for it is actually a show, don’t tell problem, at base. Your goal in the query letter is to demonstrate through your professional presentation of your project that this is a great book by an exciting new author, not just to say it.

As in, “My friends say this is the greatest novel since THE GRAPES OF WRATH. It’s also a natural for Oprah.”

“But Anne,” I hear some of you protest, “my book really is a natural for Oprah! I’m going on her show next week!”

Well, congratulations — go ahead and open your query letter with the date of your appearance on the show, and the best of luck to you. For the vast majority of you who have not already heard from her production staff, I wouldn’t suggest mentioning your book’s Oprah potential at all, either in the query letter or, if you write nonfiction, in the book proposal.

Why? Because, conservatively speaking, at least 40% of book proposals will mention the possibility of appearing on Oprah. As will most marketing plans, a hefty percentage of verbal pitches, and a higher percentage of query letters than I even like to say.

What’s the result of all of that repetition? Usually, Millicent will simply stop reading if a query letter opens with an empty boast, because to her, including such statements is like a writer’s scrawling on the query in great big red letters, “I have absolutely no idea how the industry works.”

Which, while an interesting tactic, is unlikely to get an agent or her screener to invest an additional ten seconds in reading on to your next paragraph.

That’s right, I said ten seconds: as much as writers like to picture agents and their screeners agonizing over their missives, trying to decide if such a book is marketable or not, the average query remains under a decision-maker’s eyes for less than 30 seconds.

That’s not a lot of time to make up one’s mind, is it?

Even the best-meaning Millicent might conceivably, after as short a time as a few weeks of screening queries, might start relying pretty heavily upon her first impressions. Consider, for instance, the English major’s assumption that business format is in fact not proper formatting for either query letters or manuscripts.

Again, think about it: it’s true, for one thing, and let’s face it, improper formatting is the single quickest flaw to spot. Let’s take another gander at what Millicent expects to see, a letter formatted observing standard English rules of paragraph-formation:

Now let’s take a look at exactly the same letter in business format:

Interesting how different it is, isn’t it, considering that the words are identical? In an e-mailed query, of course, the latter format would be acceptable, but on paper, it’s not the best strategic choice.

Which may, I gather, come as a surprise to some of you out there. Unfortunately, a lot of aspiring writers seem not to be aware that business format tends to be regarded in the industry as less-than-literate, regardless of whether it appears in a query letter, a marketing plan, or — heaven forfend! — a submitted manuscript. (If you don’t know why I felt the need to invoke various deities to prevent you from using business format your manuscripts, please run, don’t walk to the STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED category at right.)

In fact, I am always meeting writers at conferences and in classes who insist, sometimes angrily, that a query letter is a business letter, and thus should be formatted as such. They tell me that standards have changed, that e-mail has eliminated the need for observing traditional paragraph standards, that it’s the writing that counts, not the formatting.

I understand the logic, of course, but it just doesn’t apply here: not all businesses work in the same way. As anyone who works in an agency or publishing house would no doubt be delighted to tell you, there are many, many ways in which publishing doesn’t work like any other kind of business. One does not, for instance, require an agent in order to become a success at selling shoes.

If you’re looking for evidence of the biz’ exceptionalism, all you have to do is walk into a bookstore with a good literary fiction section. Find a book by a great up-and-coming author that’s sold only 500 copies since it came out last year, and ask yourself, “Would another kind of business have taken a chance like this, or would it concentrate on producing only what sells well? Would it continue to produce products like this year after year, decade after decade, out of a sense of devotion to the betterment of the human race?”

Okay, so some businesses would, but it’s certainly not the norm.

Yet almost invariably, when I try to tell them that publishing is an old-fashioned industry fond of its traditions, and that agents and their screeners tend to be people with great affection for the English language and its rules, I receive the same huffy reply from writers who dislike indenting: some version of, “Well, I heard/read/was told that a query/marketing plan had to be businesslike.”

I’m always glad when they bring this up — because I strongly suspect that this particular notion is at the root of the surprisingly pervasive rumor that agents actually prefer business format. I can easily envision agents stating point-blank at conferences that they want to receive businesslike query letters.

But businesslike and business format are not the same thing. Businesslike means professional, market-savvy, not overly-familiar — in short, the kind of query letter we have been talking about for the last couple of posts.

Business format, on the other hand, doesn’t dictate any kind of content at all; it’s purely about how the page is put together. There’s absolutely nothing about this style, after all, that precludes opening a query with the threat, “You’ll regret it for the rest of your natural life if you let this book pass you by!”

All of these negative examples are lifted from real query letters, by the way.

All that being said, there’s another reason that I would strenuously advise against using business format in your query letters — and a comparative glance at the two letters above will show you why.

Take another look, then put yourself in Millicent’s shoes for a moment and ask yourself: based upon this particular writing sample, would you assume that Aspiring Q. Author was familiar with standard format? Would you expect Aspiring’s paragraphs to be indented, or for him/her (I have no idea which, I now realize) NOT to skip lines between paragraphs?

Okay, would your answer to those questions change if you had a hundred query letters to read before you could get out of the office for the day, and you’d just burned your lip on a too-hot latte? (Millicent never seems to learn, does she?)

No? Well, what if it also contained a typo within the first line or two, had odd margins, or began with, “This is the best book you’ll read this year!” or some similar piece of boasting? Wouldn’t you be at least a LITTLE tempted to draw some negative conclusions from the format?

Even if you wouldn’t, Millicent would — and perhaps even should. Why? Because although most aspiring writers seem not to be aware of it, every sentence a writer submits to an agency is a writing sample. Even if the writer doesn’t treat it as such, a screener will.

After all, when that stranger comes up to sell you a meat pie, you’re going to be looking for whatever clues you can to figure out if he’s on the up-and-up.

Quick rejections are not about being mean or hating writers — they’re about plowing through the mountains of submissions that arrive constantly. The average agency receives 800-1000 queries per week (that’s not counting the New Year’s Resolution Rush, folks), so agents and screeners have a very strong incentive to weed out as many of them as possible as rapidly as possible.

That’s why, in case you were wondering, that agents will happily tell you that any query that begins “Dear Agent” (rather than addressing a specific agent by name) automatically goes into the rejection pile. So does any query that addresses the agent by the wrong gender in the salutation. (If you’re unsure about a Chris or an Alex, call the agency and ask; no need to identify yourself as anything but a potential querier.)

So does any query that is pitching a book in a category the agent is not looking to represent. (Yes, even if the very latest agents’ guide AND the agency’s website says otherwise.)

And you know what? These automatic rejections will, in all probability, generate exactly the same form rejection letter as queries that were carefully considered, but ultimately passed upon. Again: how precisely is an aspiring writer to learn what does and doesn’t work in a query?

By finding out what agency screeners like Millicent are trained to spot — and learning what appeals to her. So go to conferences and ask questions of agents about what kind of queries they like to see. Attend book readings and ask authors about how they landed their agents. Take writers who have successfully landed agents out to lunch and ask them how they did it.

But do not, whatever you do, just assume that what works in other kinds of marketing will necessarily fly in approaching an agent. After all, almost universally, they specifically ask aspiring writers not to use the hard-sell techniques used in other types of business: writers seeking representation are expected not to telephone to pitch, send unrequested materials, or engage in extracurricular lobbying like sending cookies along with a query letter.

Instead, be businesslike, as befits a career writer: approach them in a manner that indicates that you are aware of the traditions of their industry. And, of course, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 4 Comments on Okay, I get it about standard format for manuscripts. Now what does a query letter look like?

Okay, I get it about standard format for manuscripts. Now what does a query letter look like?

Hello, campers —

No time for a long-winded missive today, I’m afraid, but I’m anxious to start fulfilling a promise I made earlier in the summer. Cast your mind back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, way back in mid-June, and you’ll find that when I first began talking about how to pull together a verbal pitch, I promised that doing so it would help you crank out a stellar query letter.

Well, now’s the time to prove it.

In that spirit, I’m going to be re-running a few posts (edited) from last year’s interminable-but-useful Book Marketing 101 series. Today, we’re going to talk about how to construct a query letter from the building blocks of the pitch. (And if you’re not clear about what they are, check the category list at right — each has its own category, for easy reference.)

This is a perfect time of year to be working on polishing a query — as I’ve mentioned before, the vast majority of the publishing industry goes on vacation from mid-August until after Labor Day, so waiting until early-to-mid-September (after Labor Day, but before the Frankfort Book Fair, to be precise) makes good strategic sense.

Enjoy!

Here’s a startling statement for an online writing guru to make: I wish writers talked amongst themselves about the nuts and bolts of querying more.

Why? Well, although I know that my readers are too savvy to fall into the pitfalls of the average writer, the vast majority of query letters agents receive are either uncommunicative, petulant in tone, just poor marketing — or obviously copied from a standard one-size-fits all boilerplate.

We can do better than that, I think.

For those of you absolutely new to the process, a query letter is a 1-page (single-spaced) polite, formal inquiry sent out to an agent or editor in the hope of exciting professional interest.

It is not, contrary to popular practice, an occasion for either begging or boasting; you will want to come across as a friendly professional who has done her homework. (Or his, as the case may be.) A good query introduces the book and the author to a prospective agent in precisely the terms the industry would use to describe them.

This should sound familiar to those of you who have stuck with me all the way through Book Marketing 101: this was the purpose of the Magic First Hundred Words, wasn’t it? (For those of you new to the concept, please see a category on the list at right entitled, straightforwardly enough, THE MAGIC FIRST HUNDRED WORDS.)

And, like the hallway pitch, your goal here is not to make the agent fall down on the floor, foaming at the mouth and crying, “I will die if I do not sign this author immediately!” but to prompt a request to submit pages.

That’s a much less formidable goal, isn’t it?

How does one pull that off? By being businesslike without using business format (long-time readers, chant it with me now: documents without indented paragraphs appear illiterate to folks in the publishing industry).

There are a zillion guides out there, each giving ostensibly foolproof guidelines for how to construct a positively stellar query letter, but in my experience, simple works better than gimmicky. (Possibly because the former is rarer.) Typically, a query letter consists of five basic elements:

1. The opening paragraph, which includes the following information:

* A brief statement about why the writer is approaching this particular agent (Hint: be specific. “I enjoyed hearing you speak at Conference X,” “Since you so ably represent Author Q,” and “Since you are interested in (book category), I hope you will be intrigued by my book” all work better than not mentioning how you picked the agent in the first place.)

*The book’s title

*The book’s category (i.e., where your book would sit in Barnes & Noble. Most queries leave this off, but it’s essential. If you don’t know what this is, or are not sure where your book will fall, please see the BOOK CATEGORIES section at right).

*Word count. (Optional. Actually, I have never included this, because it makes many novels easier to reject right off the bat, but many agents to have it up front. Because, you see, it makes it easier to reject so many queries off the bat. If your work falls within the normal word count for your genre – for most works of fiction, between 80,000 and 100,000 words – go ahead and include it. And if you don’t know how to estimate word count — most of the industry does not operate on actual word count — please see the WORD COUNT category at right.)

2. A paragraph pitching the book.

3. A BRIEF paragraph explaining for whom you have written this book (that’s the target market, mind you, not a paraphrase of your dedication page) and why this book might appeal to that demographic in a way that no other book currently on the market does. If the demographic is not especially well-known (or even if it is; agents tend to underestimate the size of potential groups of readers), go ahead and include numbers.

Don’t make the very common mistake, though, of having your book sound like a carbon copy of a current bestseller: you want to show here that your work is unique. If you can compare your book to another within the same genre that has sold well within the last five years, this is the place to do it, but make sure to make clear how your book serves the target market differently and better.

4. An optional paragraph giving your writing credentials and/or expertise that renders you the ideal person to have written this book — or, indeed, absolutely the only sentient being in the universe who could have. Actually, it’s not optional for NF, and it’s a good idea for everyone.

Include any past publications (paid or unpaid) in descending order of impressiveness, as well as any contest wins, places, shows, semi-finalist lists, etc., and academic degrees (yes, even if they are not relevant to your book).

If you have no credentials that may legitimately be listed here, omit this paragraph. However, give the matter some serious, creative thought first. If you have real-life experience that gives you a unique insight into your book’s topic, include it. (Again, it need not have been paid experience.) Or any public speaking experience – that’s actually a selling point for a writer, since so few have ever read in public before their first books have come out. Or ongoing membership in a writers’ group.

Anything can count, as long as it makes you look like a writer who is approaching the industry like a professional. Or like a person who would be interesting to know, read, and represent.

5. An EXTREMELY brief closing paragraph, thanking the agent for her time, mentioning any enclosed materials (synopsis, first five pages, whatever the agent lists as desired elements), calling the agent’s attention to the fact that you’ve sent a SASE, and giving your contact information, if it is not already listed at the top of the letter. (If you can’t afford to have letterhead printed up, just include your contact information, centered, in the header.) Say you look forward to hearing from her soon, and sign off.

There, that’s not so impossible in a single page, is it?

Before you tense up at the prospect, here’s the good news: if you have been prepping your pitch, you’ve already constructed most of the constituent parts of a professional-looking query letter.

Don’t believe me? Look at how easily the building blocks snap together to make a log cabin:

Dear Ms./Mr. agent’s last name (NEVER just “Dear Agent”),
I enjoyed hearing you speak at the Martian Writers’ Conference. Not many New York-based agents take the time to come to Mars to meet the local writers; we really appreciate the ones who do.

Since you so ably represented BLUE-EYED VENUSIAN, I hope you will be interested in my book, {TITLE}. It is a {BOOK CATEGORY} that will appeal to {TARGET MARKET} because {#1 SELLING POINT}.

{ELEVATOR SPEECH}

I am uniquely qualified to tell this story, because {the rest of your SELLING POINTS, including any writing credentials}.

Thank you for your time in reviewing this, and I hope that the enclosed synopsis will pique your interest. I may be reached at the address and telephone number above, as well as via e-mail at {e-dress}. I enclose a SASE for your convenience, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

Aspiring Q. Author

Or, to show it as it might appear on an actual piece of paper (white, please; this is not the time to break out the solar yellow in an misguided effort to grab Millicent’s attention), like this:

You can pull that off without breaking a sweat, right?

Don’t worry; this structure isn’t my last word on the query, by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m going to be showing you precisely what a properly-formatted query letter looks like on the page. For today, however I’m going to leave you to ponder the possibilities. A big part of staying in this business for the long haul is knowing to pace oneself, after all.

Keep up the good work!
PS to those of you who are reading this post for the first time in the archives: this is my basic how-to post for query writing, but there is a wealth of further information located in the QUERY LETTER 101 category on the list at right. For tips on technical formatting, please see the QUERY LETTERS ILLUSTRATED category. Best of luck!

Posted on - 4 Comments on What standard format looks like, part IV: but published authors do it all the time!

What standard format looks like, part IV: but published authors do it all the time!

For the last couple of weeks — all month, if I’m honest about it — I’ve been talking about how to format a manuscript professionally, and I’m beginning to fear that in my eagerness and vim, I may have scared some of you a little. My vehemence is kindly-motivated, I assure you: contrary to popular opinion amongst aspiring writers, how a submission is presented can indeed make a very great difference in how it’s received.

Yes, yes, I hear you, those of you who have been running around to writers’ conferences this season: you can hardly throw a piece of bread at an agent or editor’s forum without hitting a pro saying, “It all depends upon the writing.” They do indeed tend to spout this aphorism for a reason — it is in fact true.

But that doesn’t mean that the quality of the writing is the ONLY criterion agents, editors, contest judges, or any of the rest of us who read manuscripts for a living use when deciding whether to read beyond the first page of a submission. Professional presentation weighs in, as do marketability, a story’s probability of appealing to its target audience (not exactly the same thing), what happens to be the surprise bestseller of the moment — and yes, that whole slew of intangibles that make up personal taste.

There is, in short, no such thing as a foolproof formula for producing the perfect manuscript for submission.

As I’ve been arguing throughout this series on formatting, however, agents, editors, contest judges, screeners, and other professional readers develop an almost visceral sense of when a manuscript is properly formatted. So rather than screening submissions with a list of don’t by their sides, they more or less automatically discount pages that are cosmetically incorrect.

This is most emphatically not the same thing, though, as rejecting such pages on the spot because, say, an aspiring writer underlined a foreign-language word on page 1 instead of italicizing it.

Much as a reader with impeccable grammar will not necessarily throw down a book that misuses semicolons, most professional readers will not instantly reject an improperly-formatted submission without SOME further provocation. But believe me, the writer in both cases is going to have to work a whole lot harder to impress the reader as literate.

Unfortunately, the prevailing standards for printed books – which, as we have seen, differ in many significant respects from standard format for manuscripts – often lead innocent writers astray. Case in point: including a table of contents in a manuscript.

That seems as if it would be helpful, doesn’t it? In fiction, including it would enable an agent to go back and re-read the submission easily; in nonfiction, it would permit an editor to skip ahead to a chapter of particular interest.

And heck, if the manuscript fell upon the floor, a well-organized table of contents might make it a trifle easier to reassemble, right?

Wrong. To the pros, a table of contents, like an index, is a courtesy to bookstore browsers trying to get a feel for the contents and buyers who do not necessarily want to read the entire book. Why, runs the industry’s logic, would an agent or editor be interested in acquiring a book if he doesn’t like it well enough to read it all?

So really, a table of contents in a manuscript is just a wasted page. Do not include it in a submission, any more than you would include an index or those boxes around text that magazines are so fond of printing. To professional eyes, it looks unprofessional, especially in fiction.

It’s also an inconvenience – and it’s never a good idea to fritter away the energies of people you want to do you great big favors like representing your book, is it?

Why inconvenient? Well, think about our time-strapped friend Millicent the agency screener for a moment: when she turns over the title page, she expects to find the first page of text there waiting for her, all ready to be judged in a flash. Instead, she finds a table of contents, something she would only find helpful if she were to read the entire manuscript. Given that she tends to reject submissions somewhere between paragraph 1 and page 5, the information that Chapter 8 begins on page 112 will most likely strike her as at best gratuitous – and at worst presumptuous.

“What gives?” she’ll say, taking an extra sip of her too-hot latte as she impatiently gets the table of contents out of her way. “Doesn’t this writer know the difference between a manuscript and a book?”

‘Nuff said, I think.

Or maybe not — do I hear some aspiring nonfiction writers out there? “But Anne,” these excellent souls point out, “a book proposal is supposed to include a table of contents for the planned book!”

Ah, I’m glad that you brought this up, because this is a very common misconception amongst first-time proposers, who tend to cram precisely the table of contents they expect to see in their eventually-published books into their proposals. They look a little something like this:

Anyone out there see problems with this as a marketing document?

Actually, I’m sure that some of your hands shot into the air even before I showed this example, in your eagerness to take issue with the notion that a submission should resemble a published book in the first place. Well caught, eager wavers. Spot any other problems?

If you said that the example above doesn’t include information that could possibly be either accurate or useful, give yourself a gold star for the day. Obviously, it would be impossible for a proposer to state with certainty where the chapter breaks would fall in the proposed book when published; all the information s/he could reasonably offer in this sort of table of contents, then, would be educated guesses about how long each chapter might be. Or perhaps a list of where those breaks fall in the draft manuscript.

But that’s not the information nonfiction agents and editors want to see in the book proposal. The information they do want to see in the annotated table of contents is a brief description of the CONTENTS of each chapter.

The word annotated should have been a clue, I guess.

And like so many other differences between professional formating and, well, everything else they see in submissions, it’s really, really obvious at first glance to someone who has seen a book proposal before whether the submitter du jour has followed the rules. Compare what the first page of a correctly put-together annotated table of contents looks like with the truncated version above:

See the difference? I assure you, Millicent will. From ten paces away.

I don’t feel I may leave this topic without addressing the other EXTREMELY common opening-of-text decoration: epigraphs, those nifty little quotes from other sources that we writers so adore.

Nobody else likes them much, but we writers think they’re great, don’t we? There is something powerfully ritualistic about typing the words of a favorite author at the beginning of our manuscripts; it’s a way that we can not only show that we are literate, but that by writing a book, we are joining some pretty exalted company.

Feeling that way about the little dears, I truly hate to mention this, but here goes: it’s a waste of ink to include them in a submission. 99.9998% of the time, they will not be read at all.

Stop glaring at me that way; it’s not my fault.

It’s true, alas: I’ve literally never met a professional reader who doesn’t just skip ‘em in a first read — or (brace yourselves, italics-lovers) any other italicized paragraph or two at the very beginning of a manuscript. They just assume, often not entirely without justification, that if it’s in italics, it doesn’t really have much to do with the story at hand, which (they conclude, not always wrongly) begins with the first line of plain text.

There’s another reason that they tend to skip ‘em: the sad fact is, at the submission stage of the game, no one cares who a writer’s favorite authors are.

The official justification for this — yes, there is one — is quite interesting: even the busiest person at an agency or publishing house picks up a manuscript in order to read ITS author’s writing, not someone else’s.

Kinda hard to fault them for feeling that way, isn’t it, since we all want them to notice the individual brilliance of our respective work?

Sentiment aside, let’s look at what including an epigraph achieves on a practical level. Instead of startling Millicent with your erudition in picking such a great quote, the epigraph will to prompt her to start skimming BEFORE she gets to the first line of your text – AND you will have made her wonder agaub if you realized that manuscript format and book format are not the same.

Good idea? Or the worst marketing idea since New Coke?

If that all that hasn’t convinced you, try this on for size: while individual readers are free to transcribe extracts to their hearts’ contents, the issue of reproducing words published elsewhere is significantly more problematic for a publishing house. While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, reproduction of published text without the author’s permission is known in the biz by another, less flattering name: copyright infringement.

If the quote is from a book that is not in the public domain, the publisher will need to obtain explicit permission to use any quote longer than fifty words. Ditto for ANY quote from a song that isn’t in the public domain, even if it is just a line or two.

So effectively, most epigraphs in manuscripts are signposts shouting to an editor: “Here is extra work for you, buddy, if you buy this book! You’re welcome!”

I’m sensing some disgruntlement out there, amn’t I? “But Anne,” I hear some epigraph-huggers cry,
“the material I’m quoting at the opening of the book is absolutely vital to include! The book simply isn’t comprehensible without it!”

Okay, if you insist, I’ll run through the right and wrong ways to slip an epigraph into a manuscript — but bear in mind that I can’t promise that even the snazziest presentation will cajole Millicent into doing anything but skipping that quote you love so much. Agreed?

Regardless of while title page format you choose, do not, under any circumstances, include a quote on the title page as an epigraph — which is what submitters are most likely to do, alas. Let’s take a gander at what their title pages tend to look like:

How likely is Millicent to notice the quote at all? Well, this was what she was expecting to see:

Actually, that wasn’t precisely what she expected — did you catch the vital piece of information he left off his title page?

If you said that Eeyore neglected to include the book category on the second example, give yourself a pile of thistles. (Hey, that’s what he would have given you.) My point is, the quote in the first example is going to stand out to Millicent like the nail in a certain critter’s tail.

Other submitters choose to eschew the title page route in order to place an epigraph on the first page of text. The result is immensely cluttered, by anyone’s standards — especially if the submitter has made the very common mistake I mentioned in my discussion of title pages last time, omitting the title page altogether and cramming all of its information onto page 1:

Where did all of our lovely white space from yesterday and the day before go? Into quoting, partially.

The last popular but ill-advised way to include an introductory epigraph is to place it on a page all by itself, as it might appear in a published book:

What’s wrong with this, other than the fact that Poe died before our author wrote Sons and Lovers? Chant it with me now, everyone: A MANUSCRIPT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO RESEMBLE A PUBLISHED BOOK.

At best, Millicent is going to huffily turn past this page unread. At worst, she’s going to think, “Oh, no, not another writer who doesn’t know how to format a manuscript properly. I’ll bet that when I turn to page one, it’s going to be rife with terrible errors.”

Does either outcome sound desirable to you? I thought not.

So what SHOULD an epigraph-insistent submitter do? Leave it out, of course — weren’t you listening before?

But if it must be there, our pal Mssr. Poe actually wasn’t all that far off: all he really did wrong here was include a slug line. The best way to include an introductory epigraph is on an unnumbered page PRIOR to page 1. On that unnumbered page, it should begin 12 lines down and be centered.

But I’m not going to show you an example of that. Why? Because I really, truly don’t think you should be including an epigraph at all at the submission stage.

Just in case I hadn’t made that clear.

That doesn’t mean you should abandon the idea of epigraphs altogether, however. Squirrel all of those marvelous quotes away until after you’ve sold the book to a publisher — then wow your editor with your erudition and taste.

Or, if you can’t wait that long, land an agent first and wow her with your erudition and taste. But don’t be surprised if she strongly advises you to keep those quotation marks to yourself for the time being.

If you are submitting directly to a publisher, do be aware that most publishing houses now place the responsibility for obtaining the necessary rights squarely upon the author. If you include epigraphs, many editors at these houses will simply assume that you have ALREADY obtained permission to use them. Ditto with self-publishing presses.

This expectation covers, incidentally, quotes from song lyrics, regardless of length.

I’m quite serious about this. If you want to use a lyric from a song that is not yet in the public domain, it is generally the author’s responsibility to get permission to use it — and while for other writing, a quote of less than 50 consecutive words is considered fair use, ANY excerpt from an owned song usually requires specific permission, at least in North America. Contact the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) for assistance in making such requests. (For a very funny first-hand view of just what a nightmare this process can be, please see FAAB Joel Derfner’s guest post on the subject.)

Have I talked you out of including an epigraph yet? I hope so.

Remember, just because you do not include your cherished quotes in your submission does not mean that they cannot be in the book as it is ultimately published. Contrary to what 99% of aspiring writers believe, a manuscript is a DRAFT, not a finished work. In actuality, nothing in a manuscript is unchangeable until the book is actually printed — and folks in the industry make editing requests accordingly.

In other words, you can always negotiate with your editor after the book is sold about including epigraphs. After you have worked out the permissions issue, of course.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 15 Comments on The times they are a-changin’ — but it’s hard to tell whether it’s for better or worse

The times they are a-changin’ — but it’s hard to tell whether it’s for better or worse

I have to confess, I’m a trifle perplexed today, campers. Should I feel hopeful about the present, near future, and life to come for aspiring writers, or shouldn’t I? Is despair appropriate, or rejoicing?

Take, for instance, the mixed news coming out of this year’s BookExpo America. the major publishers seem wary of how the combination of a slow economy and interest in the presidential election will affect what readers will be willing to buy this fall, judging by their offerings; opinions vary about what the Kindle and similar devices will mean for the future of the paper-and-ink book market; this was the first year in a long time when more independent bookstores opened in the US than closed.

Should the average writer be psyched or bummed in the face of such tidings? Try as I might, I can’t quite decide.

A little closer to home, while I was perusing the finalist list for the Contest-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, I was delighted to see frequent commenter Auburn McCanta in the poetry category (congratulations, Auburn!), as well as a few other names not entirely unknown on this website (who should e-mail me to give me permission to gloat about them, by the way).

But then I was startled to notice that the top-named finalist in the screenwriting category has had books on the New York Times bestseller list. Recently.

Hey, I’m just quoting from his website. If it and the Organization-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named’s conference promotional materials are to be believed, he’s also going to be Thursday night’s featured speaker at that very conference.

Merest coincidence? Eyebrow-raising conflict of interest for the organization? Or clever self-promotional move by a well-established author? Again, I’m not sure I can make up my mind.

To be fair, there’s no longer anything in the contest’s rules that precludes established writers from entering (as I seem to recall that there was in 2004, when I won the NF book category); it’s just traditionally been considered, well, not entirely cricket for someone making a living at it to enter an amateur contest. In theory, at least, it’s not really starting with a level playing field, is it?

At least, if the author in question is well-respected in his genre. Heck, if he had a truly unique narrative voice, it might even be impossible to maintain the anonymity that’s so vital to the credibility of a respectable literary contest.

I can only assume that the organization in question considered that possibility, though, long before it announced its finalists for this year. Given the rumors that published writers turned up in surprisingly heavy numbers on the finalist lists in other categories as well (please see the comments on Monday’s post), I’m inclined to believe that there’s been a carefully-considered rule change of which I was not aware prior to this year’s entry deadline. (Was anybody else?)

But, naturally, not having been privy to the decision-making process, I can’t really say. How can one differentiate firmly between, say, publicizing a policy change and merely letting one’s friends know about it?

In recent years, the advantages to aspiring writers of books engaging in the kind of verbal pitching that has long been the norm in the screenwriting industry have been much touted by writers’ conference organizers, and for some good reasons: by pitching to an agent or editor at a conference, a writer may be invited to submit material directly, effectively skipping the annoying and often protracted querying process.

Which is, of course, a mighty fine thing for those who can pull it off.

It has some under-advertised drawbacks, however, chief among which is the assumption that a verbal pitch is necessarily reflective of the quality of the book it describes, which is certainly not always the case. The in-person pitch also most assuredly places the shy at a serious competitive disadvantage — and every year, countless conference-goers are petrified into a state of horrified inertia by the prospect of producing a three-line pitch that effectively conveys all of the complexity of a 400-page book.

I ask you: does this expectation represent an improvement in the lives of aspiring writers, or an unreasonable additional stress?

Don’t look at me to solve that knotty dilemma — I asked you first, after all. But I will say that in my experience, the three-line pitch conference organizers are so apt to tell prospective pitchers is the ONLY possibility often isn’t what agents and editors expect to hear.

At least, not the ones who represent books for a living.

Script agents, well, that’s another story; screenplays are not my area of expertise, so please do not look to me for advice on the subject. Perhaps someone could ask the NYT bestselling author his opinion; it seems to be well-informed.

Fair warning: what you’re going to be seeing me spell out over the next couple of weeks is MY opinion about what does and doesn’t work in various types of conference pitch. Please don’t bother to inform me that others are equally vehement that the pros will stop listening after three sentences; that simply hasn’t been my experience as a successful conference pitcher, nor the experience of any other successful conference pitcher I know, or anyone who has ever taken one of my pitching classes and reported back to me…

You get the picture.

But that’s not an immense surprise, right? As those of you who have been reading my blog for a while have no doubt already figured out, my take on the publishing industry does not always conform to the prevailing wisdom. (I know: GASP! Alert the media!)

The problem with the prevailing wisdom, as I see it, is that it is so often out of date: what was necessary to land an agent 20 years ago is most emphatically not the same as what is necessary today, or what will be necessary 5 years from now. And it is now every bit as hard to land an agent as it used to be to land a book contract.

Heck, it’s significantly more difficult than it was when I signed with my current agency — and honeys, I’m not that old.

My point is, the industry changes all the time, and very quickly — and it’s not always clear immediately whether each individual change is helpful or hurtful to the aspiring writer’s chances.

If you doubt this, chew on this: when I signed the contract for my memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK, in March of 2005, it naturally contained the standard contractual provisions about truthfulness; the contract specified that my publisher believed that I believed that I was telling the truth in my book. (Which I am, in case you were wondering.)

Yet if I signed a standard NF contract for the same book today, it would almost certainly contain some provision requiring me as the author to obtain signed releases from everyone mentioned in the book.

What happened in that intervening 3+ years to alter the standard memoir contract’s provisions, you ask? A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, that’s what.

The very tangible result: industry rumor has it that a couple of years back, a major publishing house required a writer who spent a significant amount of time living with cloistered nuns to obtained signed releases from each and every one of the wimpled ones, swearing that they would not sue the publisher over the book.

Yes, you read that right. Correct me if I am wrong, but don’t nuns generally take vows of poverty? And doesn’t cloistered mean, you know, not wandering up and down the aisles at Barnes & Noble, checking out your own publicity?

Yet such is the prevailing level of concern that the publishing house was legitimately concerned that suddenly the little sisters of St. Francis of Assisi would metamorphose into a gaggle of money-hungry, lawyer-blandishing harpies. I ask you: good for writers, or not?

Perhaps this will help you decide: since the MILLION LITTLE PIECES incident, writers have been hearing at conferences, “Oh, it’s impossible to sell memoir right now.” Which is odd, because the trade papers seem to show that plenty of houses are in fact still buying memoirs aplenty.

So you’ll pardon me, I hope, for saying that it always pays to look over the standard truisms very carefully, both to see if they still apply and to see if they’re, you know, TRUE. Many, I am sad to report, are neither.

You can tell I am gearing up to saying something subversive, can’t you?

Yes, I am: I would specifically advise AGAINST walking into a meeting with an agent or editor and giving the kind of 3-sentence pitch that you will usually see recommended in writers’ publications — and practically mandated in the average conference brochure.

Or, to put it another way: I think it is a common mistake to assume that the structure that works for pitching a screenplay can be adapted without modification to books. Because, you see, the screenplay pitch is intended merely to establish the premise — and there’s quite a bit more that any agent or editor is going to need to know about a book before saying yea or nay.

“Wait just a second, Anne!” I hear some of you shouting. “I have a conference brochure right here, and it tells me I MUST limit myself to a 3-sentence pitch!”

Well pointed out, imaginary shouters — this is quite standard boilerplate advice. But think about it: the average conference appointment with an agent is 10-15 minutes long, and if you are like most writers, you will probably be very nervous.

So I have one question to ask you: do you really want to have only a minute’s worth of material prepared, so you have to wing it if the agent of your dreams wants to hear more?

Because, trust me, he IS likely to ask. I’ve heard many, many agents and editors complain that writers pitching at conferences either talk non-stop for ten minutes (not effective) or stop talking after one (ditto).

“Why aren’t they using the time I’m giving them?” they wonder in the bar. (It’s an inviolable rule of writers’ conferences that there is always a bar within staggering distance. That’s where the pros congregate to bemoan their respective fates.) “Half the time, they just dry up. Aren’t they interested in their own books?”

Oh, the 3-sentence pitch definitely has its utility: it is helpful to have one ready for when you buttonhole an agent in an elevator, when you might genuinely have only a minute and a half to make your point.

That’s why it’s called an elevator speech, in case you were wondering; it’s short enough to deliver between floors without pushing the alarm button to stop the trip.

It’s also very useful in preparing your query letter, where you can use it as the paragraph that describes the book. Once you have a really effective marketing paragraph written, you can use it many contexts. So I will definitely be walking you through how to construct one.

However, an elevator speech should not be confused with a full-blown book pitch.

To do so, I think, implies a literalism that cannot conceive that a similar process called by the same name but conducted in two completely unrelated industries might not be identical. It’s akin to assuming that because both Microsoft and Random House are concerned with word count, they must be estimating it precisely the same way — because it’s just not possible for a single term to mean more than one thing to different groups of people, right?

News flash to the super-literal: the noun bat refers to both a critter that flies and a piece of wood used to hit a ball. Learn to live with it. (And if you don’t know how literary types estimate word count — which is not usually how the fine folks at Microsoft do — please see the WORD COUNT category at right.)

In purely strategic terms, there’s another reason not to use the same pitch format as everybody else at a conference: now that the three-line pitch is so pervasive, pitch fatigue sets in even more quickly. Not forcing an agent or editor to pull your plot out of you via a series of questions may well be received as a pleasant change.

Pitch fatigue, in case you’ve never heard of it, is the industry term for when a person’s heard so many pitches in a row that they all start to blend together in the mind. It’s surprisingly tiring to listen to pitches; there’s so much emotion floating in the air, and it’s so vital to pay attention to every last detail. Even with the best intentions, after the third pitch in any given genre in any given day, the stories start to sound alike.

Even stories that are nothing alike can begin to sound alike.

I can tell you from experience that pitch fatigue can set in pretty quickly. Two years ago, at the Conference That Dares Not Speak Its Name, a group of intrepid writers, including yours truly, set up the Pitch Practicing Palace, collectively hearing over 325 individual pitches over the course of three very long days. (Good for aspiring writers or not? Opinions differ.)

Now, all of us on the PPP staff are both writers and chronic readers, so our sympathies, it is safe to say, were pretty much always on the writer’s side of the pitching desk. And we heard quite a number of truly exceptional pitches. But by the end of the first day, all of us were starting to murmur variations on, “You know, if I had to do this every day, I might start to think the rejection pile was my friend.”

Part of the problem is environmental, of course. Agents and editors at conferences are generally expected to listen patiently while sitting under flickering fluorescent lights in uncomfortable chairs, being rapidly dehydrated by punishing convention center air conditioning. You can hardly blame them for zoning out from time to time, under the circumstances.

I know: poor, poor babies, forced to endure precisely the same ambient conditions as every writer at the conference, without the added stress of trying to make their life-long dreams come true. But I’m not mentioning this so you will pity their lot in life; I’m bringing it up so you may have a clearer picture of what you will be facing.

Gather up all of those environmental factors I described above into a neat mental picture, please. Pretend you are an agent who has been listening to pitches for the past four hours.

Got it? Good.

Now ask yourself: which is more likely to snap you out of your stupor, a three-sentence pitch, which forces you to make the effort of drawing more details about the book out of a pitcher who has been told to shut up after conveying a single breath’s worth of information? Or a slightly longer pitch that explains to you not only what the book is about, but who is going to buy it and why?

Or, to consider the other common advice about structuring pitches, would you be more likely to pay attention to a pitch that is rife with generalities, glossing lightly over themes that are common to many books? Or to a pitch stuffed full of briefly-described scenes, embellished attractively with a few well-chosen significant details?

Exactly. You don’t want to hand them the same vanilla ice cream cone that everyone else has been offering them all day; you want to hand them the deluxe waffle cone stuffed with lemon-thyme sorbet and chocolate mousse.

And that, dear friends, is why I’m spending the days to come talking about how to market your work in ways that make sense to the industry, rather than just telling you to cram years of your hopes and dreams into three overstuffed sentences as…well, as others do.

By the time we reach the end of this series, my hope is that you will not only be able to give a successful pitch AND elevator speech — I would like for you to be prepared to speak fluently about your work anytime, anywhere, to anybody, no matter how influential.

Even to a New York Times bestselling writer, should you happen to bump into one.

In short, my goal here is to help you sound like a professional, market-savvy writer, rather than the nervous wreck most of us are walking into pitch meetings. To achieve that, a writer needs to learn to describe a book in language the industry understands.

The first building block of fluency follows tomorrow. I know you’re up for it.

Truth compels me to say, though, that not everyone out there agrees that my take on this process is unequivocally good for aspiring writers — including, let’s face it, some of the folks to whom I have referred above. But then, we also have a long-standing, fundamental disagreement about whether the primary purpose of a writers’ organization — or literary contest, for that matter — is to help the struggling writers out there or those already established promote their work more effectively.

Try as I might to keep my opinion to myself, hints do seem to pop out from time to time. I encourage you to make up your own minds, my friends — and to keep up the good work!

Posted on - 7 Comments on Wait — if my contest entry was so good, why didn’t it make the finals?

Wait — if my contest entry was so good, why didn’t it make the finals?

Let’s start out with the obvious question: yes, I AM just getting into the swing of a series on pitching, and yes, as a general rule, I hold off on posts-by-request until after a series is complete. So yes, normally, I wouldn’t be doing this.

But yesterday, long-time reader Karen wrote in on a topic I know a number of my readers are pondering right now, how to respond to feedback on contest entries:

With your help, I entered the contest-that-shall-remain-nameless. I’m sorry that I can’t report that I won, or even placed. I didn’t. However, life is about learning. I just received my two critiques and I can’t tell you how valuable they are. Wow! One problem I have though is this…I read the critiques to my husband. He said, “How is it possible that the critiques are that good and you DIDN’T place?” I have no answer for that.

While there are a few suggestions that I am mulling over, for the most part, the comments are super-positive. This leaves me to wonder, “then why wasn’t I a finalist?” Is it just that the competition was so steep? I’m not sure what to think of it all. On the Additional Comments section, one even says-and I quote “Get this published!!!” Hmmmm…can you cover this sometime? What to do with the critiques when you DON’T win?

Anyway- I am not angry or bitter. I am actually very encouraged. I just don’t know which direction to go. Thanks for all your help Anne. Your blog rocks! ~Karen

Karen, I hear this from good writers all the time — not the part about my blog’s rocking, necessarily (although that’s always nice to hear) but questioning how seriously to take contest-generated critique. Since contest judges are anonymous and faceless, and since judging criteria are often shrouded in levels of mystery that would make the WTO’s deliberations seem transparent by comparison, many writers are left staring at feedback, wondering, “How close is this to what an agent or editor might say about my work?”

It’s a question asked with particular frequency in my neck of the woods, with respect to the Contest-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. For those of you who do not live and write in my part of the country, the fact that the CTSNBN routinely has first-round judges give such feedback, in a format that implies that the opinions expressed are authoritative, is one of the contest’s main selling points to writers: every entrant receives two ostensibly well-informed critiques. Since this particular contest does not pay its first-round judges (nor, in the last couple of years, has it thanked them), the anonymity of the feedback presumably guarantees impartiality.

In years past, entrants did not receive their critiques until well after the conference at which the literary prizes were awarded; as of last year’s contest, the policy changed (thank goodness) so that entrants could benefit from feedback prior to pitching at the conference.

Which means, in theory, that if entrants are going to take advantage of these critiques, they have only a few weeks to do it now. So my addressing it after my pitching series was complete might be a TAD tardy. Thus the exception.

(Before I launch into it, in the interest of full disclosure I should say that I used to serve as a judge in the contest in question, but no longer do; I also won its highest nonfiction award in 2004 and was the organization’s Resident Writer for a year. In fact, the CTSNBN is my local writers’ association, whose name I no longer mention on this blog (for those of you who missed last year’s fiasco) because (a) I don’t feel that it deserves the free publicity, (b) its formerly quite prestigious conference and contest are now handled so differently that I can no longer in good conscience recommend either to my readers, (c) I think the purpose of a writers’ organization should be to help all of its members, not merely the ones who happen already to be published, and (d) I don’t like people who are mean to little old ladies. So much for that rather dull little explanation. Back to the question at hand.)

Obviously, it’s really, really hard to answer any question about how a contest entry might have been judged without, well, being one of its judges. Only someone directly involved with the administration of a contest would know for sure, for instance, if there had been a policy change in how the judges were asked to evaluate entries.

Taking a gander at the CTSNBN’s website, however, I do notice that there has been a policy shift that anyone might notice: instead of having 10 finalists in each category, there are now only 8. Which would almost inevitably mean that the competition for each finalist slot would be more intense.

So you’re quite right to wonder about the competition level, Karen — it’s not unusual for a category with 10 or 15 finalist slots to have seven or eight times that many entries that could have been finalists in a less competitive contest. When the field is narrowed still further, it’s probably safe to conclude that the differences between Finalist #8’s entry and Not-Finalist #1’s were pretty miniscule.

If not entirely a matter of personal literary taste.

Literary contest entrants are often shocked to realize this, but evaluating writing can never be entirely objective. Oh, the issues that tend to knock most entries out of the running are fairly easy to grade objectively — formatting problems, grammar, spelling, adherence to contest rules, and so forth — but presumably, any entry that would even have a chance of making the finals would not run afoul of any of these.

Beyond exclusion factors, judging style is necessarily subjective — which means, logically, that the difference of the tenth of a point in scoring that might have separated Finalist #8’s ranking from even the next twenty below must be equally so. Lest we forget, the individual judge just gets to assign a numerical value to the entry, typically, not to say this one should be a finalist or that one shouldn’t.

If another judge was more generous with points…well, I don’t need to spell out the inference, do I?

My point is, it’s not as though judging a writing contest is as straightforward as being able to rank every single entry as clearly better or worse than the one just above or just below it. Judges tend to think of them in groups, and the fact is, in a contest with a lot of good entries, one should expect that there would be more finalist-worthy entries than finalist slots.

Particularly if a contest is, for reasons that escape me, trying to limit its finalist slots.

Also, the entrant can’t know if the judges were looking for something specific this year — which happens more than the average entrant tends to think. The broader the category descriptions, the more likely this kind of unofficial judging preference is to crop up, I’ve noticed, if only to narrow the criteria for winning.

As one might want to do if, say, a contest lumped Mainstream Fiction and Literary Fiction into a single category, when the writing standards for each in the industry are quite different.

I always wonder about policy shifts when I hear of contest feedback like, “Get this published,” with or without the extra exclamation points. Frankly, from a judge’s point of view, it doesn’t make sense as feedback UNLESS the critiquer had some reason to believe that your entry WOULDN’T make the finals and didn’t want you to be discouraged by that outcome.

Think about it: as feedback goes, it isn’t all that helpful otherwise, since it’s unlikely to the point of ridiculousness that trying to get the entry published would already have occurred to anyone who entered a literary contest.

Judges’ perceptions of marketability also vary widely, especially if the judging pool’s level of professional experience is uneven. (As might be the case, for instance, in a contest where many of the long-time judges abruptly resigned in a huff and needed to be replaced in a hurry.)

If you’ll recall from my earlier posts on contest judging, marketability is usually weighted almost as heavily as style in judging. As both are in the eye of the beholder — and the former tends not to play a very heavy role on a feedback sheet — it’s impossible for the entrant to figure out how the points were assigned.

As if all that weren’t confusing enough, the rating forms (where the entries are actually assessed) are typically quite different from the feedback forms (which are sent back to the entrant). The feedback may or may not be reflective of the numerical scores the judge assigned the entry. That’s left up to the judge’s discretion.

One more possible rating factor to consider: although from a judge’s perspective, there is a very palpable difference between an entry that has no outstanding problems (which would tend to receive a very positive feedback sheet) and one that has the WOW! factor that just screams, “This one’s got a shot to win,” most contest critique forms do not reflect that. I cannot speak to the CTSNBN’s current format, but in the past, a judge would have had to make an additional effort to note this.

On most feedback forms, these two types of manuscript might seem very similar indeed.

On the bright side, this usually means that an entrant who received glowing feedback can at least be sure that she has not made any major mistakes — not an achievement at which any of us should be sneezing. But that doesn’t really offer many tangible hints about how to up the WOW! in the entry, does it?

I hate to bring up the other logical possibility, but it’s not beyond belief that the judges were kinder in their written evaluations than they were in their numerical ones, the ones that actually counted toward whether the entry made it to finalist consideration or not.

I know: the very notion is annoying, from the entrant’s perspective. But it does happen. In fact, sometimes the rules and even the evaluation forms themselves promote this kind of judging duality.

Manuscript critique is a serious responsibility, you know; it’s easy to crush someone’s ego without really trying. Back in the Paleolithic era, when I used to be a judge in that particular contest, we were encouraged to accentuate the positive in our feedback — and to provide as much specific, helpful feedback as possible. Some judges made the effort, some didn’t. (Some also interpreted this dictum to mean not to mention ANY areas of possible improvement, but that’s neither here nor there.)

To answer your husband’s question directly, then: since there’s not necessarily a correlation between the judges’ critique and the scores they assign the entry, it’s not really possible for an entrant who receives stellar feedback to figure out WHY her entry didn’t make the finals. Sorry about that.

But in any case, the critique forms would not give a solid indication of why one entry placed, rather than being just one of the finalists. Few literary contests are judged in a single round. In the case of the CTSNBN, the first-round judges (who produce the feedback) are neither the people who tabulate the results and pick the finalists (that’s the category chair) nor the people who decide who will win and place amongst the finalists (usually one of the agents or editors attending the conference).

Clear as mud, isn’t it?

In fairness, though, the CTSNBN’s judging practices (or what they were in the past, when I was actually involved with them) aren’t really any less opaque than most literary contests’. It’s in a contest’s interest to pretend that there are always clear demarcations between finalist and non-finalist entries, just as they would like us to believe that the difference in quality between first and second place, or between third and finalist, is so obvious that any professional could spot it instantly.

But in practice, as anyone who has ever been a contest judge can tell you (or would if s/he were being honest about it), the lines are seldom so clearly drawn.

What does all this mean for the feedback, those of you who entered the CTSNBN ask? Well, it’s not really possible to answer that without (a) reading the piece in question and (b) reading the feedback, of course. But here are a few general rules of thumb:

(1) If the critique contains discussion of any technical points — formatting, grammar, etc. — address those issues right away. Chances are, if these problems caught the eye of a contest judge, they are serious enough to annoy an agent or editor as well.

(2) If the critique doesn’t bring up technical problems, be very pleased with yourself.

(3) Weed out the generalized part of the critique (“Get this published!”); these points are not going to be of much use in revision. Save the compliments to cheer yourself up on a rainy day.

(4) Make a list of the specific critique points, so that you may weigh the suggestions and see if they seem reasonable. (If you’re like most writers, you may need to sit with them awhile and/or get an outside opinion before you can make this judgment. For tips on maximizing your objectivity about your own work, please see the GETTING GOOD AT ACCEPTING FEEDBACK category at right.) If they strike you as good ideas, try incorporating them.

(5) If any part of the critique doesn’t make sense to you, PLEASE do not incorporate it blindly, simply because it seems to be coming from an authoritative source. Find some good first readers to go over your work to see if the critique makes more sense to them.

This is an especially good idea if the feedback in question concerns the marketability of your entry. As I said, contest judges’ levels of experience in the industry vary WILDLY — not all of the feedback you receive may be of sterling value.

Remember, typically, first-round judges are writers, not agents or editors: their sense of what is and isn’t marketable may not be the current wisdom in the industry. Do your homework to double-check before you do a major overhaul on your manuscript based upon an anonymous judge’s opinion.

In short, treat contest feedback in much the same way as you would any other manuscript critique: warily, using what’s helpful and applicable without merely substituting someone else’s judgment for your own. Often, these critiques can provide substantial insight, but ultimately, it’s your book, right?

Phew — that was a heavy topic, wasn’t it? Next time, we’ll traipse off into the lighter world of…wait, we were talking about pitching, weren’t we? Never mind.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on R.I.P., Mr. M — and a few thoughts on marketing

R.I.P., Mr. M — and a few thoughts on marketing

My mother called me with some sad news today: Bob Mondavi, one of the grand old men of my childhood, passed away a few days ago. He was 94, so it wasn’t precisely a surprise, but while normally, the death of a nice little old man would be primarily a matter of local mourning, in this case, pretty much everyone who has ever drunk a glass of good American wine should be just a little saddened by Mr. M’s passing.

Why? Because Robert Mondavi was to a great extent responsible for Napa Valley wines becoming respectable. If you’ve ever paid more than $10 for a bottle of American wine, you might want to drink a toast to his memory.

Oh, there had been good wine coming out of the region for decades before he broke off from his family’s Charles Krug Winery to form the Robert Mondavi Winery (viticulturists are not known for their retiring egos) in the mid-1960s — in the 1890s, my great-uncle and great-grandfather won European awards for a wine grown in what is now known as the Carneros — and there were certainly much better wines being made than at RMW throughout my formative years.

Yet Mr. M was one of the first to see that it wasn’t enough just to make good wine — the world needed to know about it.

Sound familiar? This was someone who understood marketing.

How well, you ask? Well, as hometown legend has it, for years and years, it was extremely difficult for Californian winemakers to sell Sauvignon Blanc to restaurateurs. Not because it isn’t a perfectly lovely varietal — Mike Grgich, another of the grand old men of my childhood (perhaps even grander because he liked to sport a rakish beret year-round), has been making one of the best liquids to accompany fish available on earth since I was in pigtails — but because, I kid you not, people weren’t sure how to pronounce Sauvignon.

So they felt uncomfortable trying to say it out loud in front of a waiter.

How did Mr. M handle it, you ask? By changing the name of the wine.

Seriously — RMW was the first to release Sauvignon Blanc under the much easier-to-pronounce moniker Fumé Blanc. The switch was so successful that within a few years, one of the easiest ways to tell if the would-be snob across the table from one on a date knew a grape from a raisin was if he insisted that Fumé Blanc was actually the name of the grape.

Which it isn’t — and couldn’t be, as both of the words in question are adjectives: Sauvignon is the varietal, and thus a noun, but fumé means smoked; blanc means white. By a certain stretch of tastebud definition, a Sauvignon Blanc could be said to have some rather smoky undertones.

But really, what people started ordering in restaurants was a kippered pale thing — which could refer, logically, to anything from a cigarette to sole. But heavens, does it roll off the tongue!

In latter days, like so many family wineries, RMW became the possession of a corporation while retaining the our-kids-and-grandkids-work-here façade. The old winemaking names stick to the the buildings and land long after the flesh-and-blood people who bore those names are long gone. (Which is why, in case you were curious, there’s hasn’t been a Chuck making Two-Buck Chuck for quite some time now.) To outsiders, the Mondavi name, like so many others, is just another brand.

But it was a sad day for a lot of locals when the Mondavis left the Robert Mondavi Winery, the end of an era of winemakers who still remembered having to fight the stigma that used to attach to any American wine.

Mr. M founded RMW the year I was born, and I was graduating from middle school before people stopped laughing at the phrase Californian fine wine. Those grapes have come a long way, baby.

So goodbye, Mr. M. The winemaking — yes, and the wine-drinking — world is poorer for your loss. I hope the angels pulled up something grand from the cellar in honor of your arrival.

And yes, Virginia, I am going to tie all this into advice on your writing career. Just watch me.

How? Well, like it or not, querying is marketing.

A writer has only a very, very short amount of time to grab an agent’s attention in a query letter or a pitch, especially in an e-mailed query. It’s imperative, therefore, to label your book correctly — and that means learning to define it in the terms used by the industry.

Yes, I AM talking about book categories.

Stop groaning, long-time readers — judging by the average query letter, many writers simply don’t know that the industry runs on book categories.

But think of it from the other side of the desk. It would be literally impossible for an agent to sell a book to a publisher without a category label — in an agent’s pitch, it’s usually mentioned before either the title or the premise. And since no agency represents every kind of book, or even every kind of novel, category is the typically the first thing an agency screener is trained to spot in a query.

Knowing that, think about Millicent’s mood immediately after she’s burnt her lip on that latte: how likely is she to feel charitable toward a query that makes her search for the category or — sacre bleu! — guess it?

Some writers, bless their warm, fuzzy, and devious hearts, think that they are being clever by omitting the book type, lest their work be rejected on category grounds. “This agency doesn’t represent mysteries,” this type of strategizer thinks, “so I just won’t tell them until they’ve fallen in love with my writing.”

I have a shocking bit of news for you, Napoléon: the industry simply doesn’t work that way. If Millicent does not know where the book mentioned will eventually rest on a shelf in Barnes & Noble, she’s not going to ask to read it.

Do I see some raised hands out there? You, in the front row: “But Anne, not all books, particularly novels, fall into obvious categories! What if I’m genuinely not sure?”

Good question, You. Yes, for most books, particularly novels, there can be legitimate debate about which shelf would most happily house it, and agents recategorize their clients’ work all the time. However, people in the industry speak and even think of books by category, so you’re not going to win any Brownie points with them by making them guess what kind of book you’re trying to get them to read.

Part of learning to market your writing well involves developing the skills to describe it in terms the industry will understand. When in doubt, pick the category that coincides with what the agency (or, better still, particular agent to whom you are addressing your query letter) represents.

If you found the last paragraph mystifying, please see the posts under the BOOK CATEGORIES heading at right. Scroll down until you find the entries on how to decide which is for you, and study it as if it were the Rosetta Stone.

In a sense, it is: book categories provide terms of translation between the often mutually incomprehensible conceptions of manuscripts held by their authors and the people they are asking to represent them.

Think of your query letter as a label for the bottle of wine you’re trying to sell.

Stop laughing; it’s not all that far-fetched a comparison. Just as a wine connoisseur expects the label to tell her what kind of grapes were used to produce the bottle she’s considering serving with her dinner, to try to figure out if it’s the kind of wine she tends to like, Millicent and her ilk want a query letter or pitch to inform them up front what kind of a book the querier is offering.

That’s not so unreasonable, is it?

Or, better yet, think of it as a personal ad. (Oh, come on, admit it: everyone reads them from time to time, if only to see what the new kink du jour is.) In it, you are introducing yourself to someone with whom you are hoping to have a long-term relationship — which, ideally, it will be; I have close relatives with whom I have less frequent and less cordial contact than with my agent — and as such, you are trying to make a good impression.

So which do you think is more likely to draw a total stranger to you, ambiguity or specificity in how you describe yourself?

This is a serious question. Look at your query letter and ponder: have you, as so many personal ads and queries do, been describing yourself in only the vaguest terms, hoping that Mr. or Ms. Right will read your mind correctly and pick yours out of the crowd of ads? Or have you figured out precisely what it is you want from a potential partner, as well as what you have to give in return, and spelled it out?

To the eye of an agent or screener who sees hundreds of these appeals per week, writers who do not specify book categories are like personal ad placers who forget to list minor points like their genders or sexual orientation.

Yes, it really is that basic, in Millicent’s world.

And writers who hedge their bets by describing their books in hybrid terms, as in “it’s a cross between a political thriller and a historical romance, with helpful gardening tips thrown in,” are to professional eyes the equivalent of personal ad placers so insecure about their own appeal that they say they are into, “long walks on the beach, javelin throwing, or whatever.”

Not very effective marketing, is it? Other than provoking idle speculation about precisely what kinds of activities would logically fall into the whatever category, appealing to both the beach-walker and the javelin-thrower, labeling this vague just isn’t all that intriguing.

Trust me, to the eyes of the publishing industry, this particular type of complexity doesn’t make a writer look interesting, or a book like an innovative genre-crosser. To them, this at best looks like an attempt to curry favor by indicating that the writer in question is willing to manhandle his book in order to make it anything the agent wants.

At worst, it comes across as the writer’s being so solipsistic that he assumes that it’s the query-reader’s job to guess what “whatever” means in this context.

Again: just how cordially do you think Millicent is going to respond to an invitation to play a guessing game with a total stranger? And don’t you want to know before you order a glass of wine whether it’s a white or a red?

Be specific, and describe your work in the language Millicent will understand. Because otherwise, you run the risk that she’s just not going to understand the book you are offering well enough to know that any agent in her right mind should be grateful to read it.

And please, don’t allow a handful of rejections to convince you that you don’t have a marketable book. Remember, there was a time that wine sellers laughed whenever anyone said that good wine was being produced in the Napa Valley.

Ask the shade of Bob Mondavi: it took a whole lot of convincing — yes, and giving away a whole lot of sample tastes — to establish the region’s reputation to the point that a Napa Valley wine meant something specific in the potential buyer’s mind. About fifteen years’ worth, in fact.

Not a bad parallel for an established author’s quest to market her latest work vs. a first-time writer’s, eh?

Stop giggling; it’s true. If the potential buyer is already familiar with a winery’s reputation, it’s far easier to cajole him into taking a chance on its most recent vintage than if he’s never heard of it. It might take some persistent marketing to convince him to taste what’s in the bottle and judge for himself whether the wine’s any good.

Think about it: whose book are you more likely to pick up in a bookstore, a brand-new author’s first book or the latest from an author you’ve been reading for years? And how likely are you to look for a thriller in the romance section of the bookstore?

Label your work well. You want Millicent to ask to taste what’s in the bottle, don’t you?

Next time, I’ll get back to craft issues. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Tying up the loose ends of a contest entry: one last foray into the practical, the sublime, and the frivolous

Tying up the loose ends of a contest entry: one last foray into the practical, the sublime, and the frivolous

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For those of you tuning into this series late, for the last — oh, how long has it been, a few weeks? A few months? A decade or two? — I’ve been going over the ins and outs of literary contest entries. This is, thank goodness, the last post in this series for a good long time, although naturally, I welcome your questions on the subject whenever they should happen to occur to you.

The important thing for our purposes today, however, is that this is the last PLANNED post on entries aimed at this year’s contest season. I’ve been promising a nice, long series on manuscript megaproblems for quite some time now, and I’m eager to leap right into it.

Or, rather, to collapse into a quivering little heap of advice-giving exhaustion for a few days, THEN leap right into it.

To our muttons, then. I have one more question for the pre-entry manuscript scan (and since a couple of people have complained that the darling tiger animation was distracting, I’ll omit it this time):

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

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

Although contests tend to concentrate on as-yet unrecognized writing talent, they are simply not set up, in most cases, to reward the writer who is clearly gifted, but has not yet mastered the rudiments of professional presentation.

And this is very sad, I think, because one of the things that becomes most apparent about writing after a judge has read a couple of hundred entries is that the difference between the entries submitted by writers with innate talent and writers without is vast. An experienced eye — of the kind belonging to a veteran contest judge, agent, or editor — can rather easily discern the work of what used to be called “a writer of promise.”

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

Now, unfortunately, writers of promise, like everybody else, tend to have their work rejected without explanation, so it’s extremely difficult to tell — even after months or years of patient querying — where one’s own work falls on the talent spectrum.

To put it as kindly as possible, until you have weeded out all of the non-stylistic red lights from your contest entries, you truly cannot gain a realistic feel for whether you need to work more on your writing or not.

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

Oh, and it helps to be lucky, too.

Okay, let’s assume for the sake of rounding out this darned series that your answer to Question #17 was a resounding, “By all I hold holy, YES!” Let’s further assume, for my peace of mind, that you have made all of the changes that Questions 1-16 suggested to you and run it past a trusted first reader or two.

If you haven’t yet done all three, please don’t tell me: I’ll never get to sleep tonight otherwise. Help me preserve my illusions.

So what else should you do BEFORE you seal all of that greatness into an envelope and mail it off in the hopes of future glory? Well, first, you should read the ENTIRETY of your entry IN HARD COPY, ALOUD, before you send it anywhere at all.

Oh, come on: you didn’t see that one coming?

Yes, you should proof it again, especially if you made even the most minor textual alteration in your last read-through. As virtually anyone in the industry can tell you, even very, very experienced authors often inadvertently miss manuscript gaffes — and, as regular readers of this blog are already aware, my professional editor’s hat (oh, it’s fetching, I assure you) gets all in a twist at the notion of any writer’s proofreading solely on a computer screen.

Since I love you people, I shall spare you a repetition of all the excellent reasons you should NOT do this. Just humor me, okay?

If you decide to break my heart and perform the final read-through on your computer — as long experience tells me that some of you will — at least avoiding using your word processor’s spell- and grammar-checker when you are exhausted. As you might be, to pick a random example, in the dead of night or a few hours before that contest entry needs to be postmarked.

Why, you ask? It’s just too easy to hit the CHANGE button when your eyes get blurry — a faulty spell- and grammar-checker choice can obviate hours and hours of your earlier hard work.

Don’t even get me started again on the chronic inadequacies of most word processing programs’ grammar checkers! Mine disapproves of gerunds, apparently on general principle, strips accent marks off French words, and regularly advises me to use the wrong form of THERE. (If anybody working at Microsoft does not know the ABSOLUTELY IMMUTABLE rules governing when to use THERE, THEIR, AND THEY’RE, I beg of you: drop me a comment, send me a letter, or just start shouting loudly in my general direction, and I shall make everything clear.)

Like a bad therapist, a poor grammar checker cannot be sufficiently disregarded, but even in the unlikely event that your grammar checker was put together by someone remotely familiar with the English language as she is spoke, you should NEVER rely solely upon what it tells you to do.

If you’re in doubt, look it up.

There is an especially good reason to read the synopsis out loud: to make sure it stands alone as a story. Since part of the point of the synopsis is to demonstrate what a good storyteller you are, flow is obviously important.

If you have even the tiniest reservations about whether you have achieved this goal, read your synopsis out loud to someone unfamiliar with your project — and then ask your listener to tell the basis story back to you. If there are holes in your account, this method will make them leap out at you.

Insofar as a hole can leap.

Once you have perfected your entry, print it on nice paper. This may seem silly, but it sometimes does make a difference, believe it or not.

By nice paper, I’m not talking about hot pink sheets or pages that you have hand-calligraphed with gold leaf and Celtic designs. Either of those would get your entry disqualified on sight in most contests.

No, I mean high-quality white paper, the kind of stuff you might print your resume on if you REALLY wanted the job. Back in my contest-winning days, I favored bright white 24-lb. cotton. Yes, it’s a little more expensive than ordinary printer paper; live a little. If this seems extravagant to you, ask yourself: have I ever walked into an interview wanting the job as much as I want to have my book published?

If your finances genuinely prohibit that small splurge, at least make sure that you don’t use less than 20-lb — and would this be a good time to point out that virtually every photocopier on the planet is stocked at this very moment with paper that’s quite a bit flimsier than this?

It tears easily. It wrinkles as it travels through the mail. It’s dingy-looking.

Nice paper is a pleasure to hold, but frankly, there’s more to this strategy than giving your judges visceral pleasure. The vast majority of contest entries are printed on very low-quality paper — and with printer cartridges that had apparently seen better days around the end of the Clinton administration. When multiple copies are required for submission, they generally show up on the flimsy paper so often found in copy shop photocopiers.

Spring for something nicer, and your entry will automatically come across as more professional to the judges.

It may not be fair, but it’s true, so it’s very worth your while to invest a few extra bucks in a decent ream. 20-pound paper or heavier will not wrinkle in transit unless the envelope is actually folded, and bright white paper gives the impression of being crisper.

Avoid anything in the cream range — this is the time for brilliant white.

For what it’s worth, I have observed over time that agents and editors, too, seem to treat manuscripts printed in Times New Roman on bright, heavy white paper with more respect than other manuscripts. The only drawback — and it was a significant one, I don’t deny it — was that when I printed up a draft of my memoir for my editor on lovely cotton 24-pound paper, it came back to me smelling like an ashtray. Turns out cotton paper soaks up ambient smoke like a sponge. My cats shied away from my desk for weeks afterward.

I’ve told this story a couple of time before, so for the sake of those of you who have, ahem, already had the opportunity to laugh at the joke, I went back and sniffed the manuscript box again. (Ah, the things that I do to amuse my readers!) And you know what? More than 2 1/2 years later, the darned thing STILL smells like a smokers’ lounge.

Now THAT’s good paper.

One last thing: before you seal the envelope, GO BACK AND REREAD THE CONTEST RULES. Have you met each and every requirement? Have you included every needed element? Are your margins precisely what the contest specified?

It may seem a bit obsessive to re-check this often, but as I have been telling you all throughout this series, judges are looking for reasons to knock entries out of finalist consideration. It is absolutely imperative, then, that you follow every rule to the letter.

And if that isn’t enough to convince you to check again, perhaps this little statistic will: in the average contest, a good 5% of entries show up with something really basic missing, like the check or a second title page.

Best of luck with your entries, this contest season and forevermore. As always, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The contest entry checklist concludes: ready, steady, GO!

The contest entry checklist concludes: ready, steady, GO!

liberty-leading-the-people-jpeg.jpg

Happy International Women’s Day, everybody! As Marianne (a.k.a. Liberty) shows us above, what’s a little wardrobe malfunction when there are goals to be achieved?

Speaking of malfunctions, for the past few days, I have talking about a series subtle (and not-so-subtle) contest entry snafus that a savvy entrant might want to avoid. To this end, I have asked the entry-happy among you to print out a hard copy of that soon-to-be-sent-out work, give it a thorough read — and subject it to a fairly thorough cross-examination.

Actually, those of you who are not planning to enter a contest anytime soon might want to subject the first chapters of your submissions to this friendly little grilling as well. As I have been mentioning throughout this series, judges often share reading preferences and pet peeves with agents, editors, and their screeners.

In other words, subjecting your opening pages to this set of questions might make Millicent like them more.

Everybody comfy? Okay, let’s resume.

coolclips_wb024789.gif(10) In the chapter itself, is it apparent where this story is going? Is it apparent that it IS going somewhere?

Were the groans I just heard echoing through the ether from those of you who have chosen the contest route over the submission route because agents are so darned well, market-oriented? If so, I sympathize: an aspiring writer does not have to attend many literary conferences to become well and truly sick of hearing that an entry should begin the action from the first line of page one.

Contest judges tend to be a bit more tolerant than the average agency screener, but then, they are substantially more likely to read pages and pages, rather than paragraphs and — well, no, Millicent often doesn’t make it all the way through even the first paragraph of a submission — before making up her mind about the quality of the writing.

However, even in literary fiction competitions, it’s rare to see a fiction entry that doesn’t establish an interesting character in an interesting situation on page one win or place, any more than a nonfiction entry that doesn’t start its argument until page four tends to walk off with top honors.

coolclips_wb024789.gif(11) Is the best opening line (or paragraph) for my work actually opening the text of my entry — or is it buried around page 4?

This question almost always surprises aspiring writers, but in many fiction and nonfiction contest entries (and submissions, if I’m going to tell the truth here), there is a perfectly wonderful opening line or image hidden somewhere in the middle of the first chapter. One way to catch it is by reading the text aloud.

If you find that this is the case with your entry, you might want to take a critical look at the paragraphs/pages/prologue/chapters that currently come before that stellar opening line, image, or scene. Does the early part absolutely need to be there?

That last question made half of you clutch your chests, anticipating an imminent heart attack didn’t it? In most cases, it’s not as radical a surgery as it sounds.

Often, the earlier bits are not strictly necessary to the narrative except as explanatory prologue. Very, very, VERY frequently, opening exposition can go. Particularly when it takes the form of backstory or characters telling one another what they already know in order to bring the reader up to speed — many, if not most, fiction entries overload the first few pages, rather than simply opening the story at an exciting point and filling in background later.

Gradually.

Also, as I mentioned yesterday, there is absolutely no good reason that the version of your chapter that you enter in a contest has to be identical to what you would submit to an agent or editor. Hey, here’s an interesting notion: why not enter a truncated version that begins at that great opening line in a contest and send a non-truncated version to an agent who has requested it, to see which flies better?

coolclips_wb024789.gif(12) Does my synopsis present actual scenes from the book in glowing detail, or does it merely summarize the plot?

Okay, out comes the broken record again: the synopsis, like everything else in your contest entry, is a writing sample, every bit as much. Make sure it demonstrates to the judges that you can WRITE — and that you are professional enough to approach the synopsis as a professional necessity, not a tiresome whim instituted by the contest organizers to satisfy some sick, sadistic whim of their own.

Yes, Virginia, even in those instances where length restrictions make it quite apparent that there is serious behind-the-scenes sadism at work.

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

Oh, and try not to replicate entire phrases, sentences, or — sacre bleu! — entire paragraphs from the entered chapter in the synopsis or vice versa. Entries exhibit this annoying trait all the time, and believe me, judges both notice it and find it kind of insulting that an entrant would think that they WOULDN’T notice it. (Millicent usually shares this response, incidentally.)

Listen: the average contest entry, even in a book-length category, is under 30 pages. You’re a talented enough writer not to repeat yourself in that short an excerpt, aren’t you?

coolclips_wb024789.gif(13) Does the chapter I’m submitting in the packet fulfill the promise of the synopsis? Does the synopsis seem to promise as interesting and well-written a book as the chapter implies?

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times throughout this series, it’s not at all uncommon for the synopsis and chapter tucked into an entry packet to read as though they were written by different people. Ideally, the voice should be similar in both — and not, as is so often the case, a genre-appropriate chapter nestling next to a peevish, why-on-earth-do-I-have-to-write-this-at-all summary.

It’s also not unusual for a synopsis not to make it clear where the submitted chapter(s) will fit into the finished book, especially an entry where the excerpt is not derived from the opening. It’s never, ever a good idea to confuse your reader, especially if that reader happens to have the ability to award your manuscript a prize.

Remember, it’s not the reader’s responsibility to figure out what’s going on in a manuscript, beyond following the plot and appreciating the twists and turns: it’s the writer’s responsibility to make things clear.

coolclips_wb024789.gif(14) Does this entry read like an excerpt from a great example of its book category?

Okay, I’ll admit it: as a professional reader, I’m perpetually astonished at how few aspiring writers seem to look at their work critically and ask this question. All too often, when I bring it up, the response is a muttered (or even shouted) diatribe about how demeaning it is to think of art in marketing terms.

Yet it’s a perfectly reasonable question to put to any writer who hopes one day to sell his work: like it or not, very few agencies or publishing houses are non-profit institutions. If they’re going to take a chance on a new writer, they will need to figure out how to package her work in order to make it appeal to booksellers and their customers.

Like the industry, contest judges tend to think in book categories, not merely in generalities as broad as fiction, nonfiction, good, bad, marketable, appealing to only a niche market, and unmarketable. So it’s a GOOD thing when a judge starts thinking a paragraph or two into your entry, “Wow, this is one of the best (fill in genre or book category here) I’ve ever seen.”

In fact, at least two judges will pretty much have to produce that particular sentiment for your entry to proceed to the finalist round of any literary contest. Sometimes more.

So if YOU can’t look at your entry and your favorite example of a book in your chosen category and say, “Okay, these two have similar species markings,” you might want to reconsider whether you’ve selected the right category for it. Which brings me to:

coolclips_wb024789.gif(15) Does this entry fit the category in which I am entering it?

This is a slightly different question from the last one, because as I mentioned earlier in this series, contests do not always categorize writing — particularly fiction — in the same way that the publishing industry does. Just as they will frequently lump apparently unrelated book categories into megacategories (as, for instance, the Contest-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named’s rather perplexing practice of combining mainstream and literary fiction into a single designation), they will often define types of books differently from the pros.

Such ambiguities are not, alas, always apparent from a casual reading of the contest’s promotional materials. Double-, triple-, and quadruple-check the rules, not forgetting to scan contest’s ENTIRE website and entry form for semi-hidden expectations.

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

Yes, even if you’re reading this a few days before the deadline. Categorization is a crucial decision.

coolclips_wb024789.gif(16) Reading over this again, does this sound like my writing? Does it read like my BEST writing?

I know, I know: this last set of questions sounds like an appeal to your writerly vanity, but honestly, it isn’t. As I believe I have mentioned 2300 times within the last few weeks, original voices and premises tend to win good literary contests far more often than even excellent exercises in what we’ve all seen before.

Which is, of course, as it should be.

However, it can be genuinely difficult for a writer to see the difference in her own work, particularly if she happens to be writing in the same book category as her favorite author. Unconscious voice imitation is almost inevitable while one is developing a voice of one’s own.

You should save your blushes here, because virtually every author in the world has done this at one time or another, consciously or unconsciously. It’s only natural to think of our favorite books as the world’s best exemplars of great writing, and for what resembles them in our own work therefore to be better than what doesn’t.

But let’s put writerly ego in proper perspective here: you want to win a literary contest because of what is unique about your work, don’t you, rather than for a dutiful resemblance to a successful author’s best work?

Of course you do — just as you want to be signed by an agent who loves your writing for what is like no one else’s, and sell your book to an editor who doesn’t want to cut and paste until your book reads like the latest bestseller. So it honestly is in your best interests to weed out verbiage that doesn’t sound like YOU.

Think about that a little before you send off your entry — it may seem a tad counter-intuitive, especially to those of you who have taken many classes or attended many writers’ conferences, where one is so often TOLD to ape the latest bestseller. The folks who spout that advice are almost invariably talking about writing a SIMILAR book — which, in their minds, means one that could easily be marketed to the same vast audience, not a carbon copy of the original.

This is a business where small semantic distinctions can make a tremendous difference, my friends. Ponder the paradoxes — and keep up the good work!