Posted on - 8 Comments on Still more about contests: the unwritten rules

Still more about contests: the unwritten rules

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While we’re on the subject of contests, I have a wonderful announcement about a member of the Author! Author! community: longtime reader Georgiana Kotarski, better known around these parts as MooCrazy, was honored by the Storytelling World Resource Awards!

As was, coincidentally, a children’s book by my erstwhile elementary school librarian, Denys Cazet, who used to read his works-in-progress to us wee ones at storytime. (And yes, I did go to the world’s best schools.)

Congratulations, Georgiana — and Mr. Cazet, too! Let’s take a gander at his book cover, too, while we’re at it:

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Georgiana’s award-winning book, GHOSTS OF THE SOUTHERN TENNESSEE VALLEY, is available for sale on Amazon. As is Mr. Cazet’s , The Perfect Pumpkin Pie, should you be interested in checking them out. The folks who judge storytelling ability think that we all should, and hey, that’s good enough for me.

I’m always encouraged when books from small presses, such as Georigana’s GHOSTS OF THE SOUTHERN TENNESSEE VALLEY, win these awards. Not just for the underdog value (although it’s that, too), but because it’s great to see what a good, old-fashioned editorial handling can do for a well-written book.

In fact, I have it on pretty good authority that it was the publisher who nominated Georgiana’s book — how’s that for supporting one’s authors? Quoth she:

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One thing I’d like to say about the contest is that I never thought of entering one. I was too lazy and also assumed I wouldn’t win. I didn’t even know my publisher had entered me. So there is a lesson there for other blog readers: have a little faith in yourself!

I couldn’t agree with you more, Moo. Which is why I’m getting right back to business.

As I pointed out earlier in this series, although marketability is surprisingly seldom listed as one of the judging criteria in contest rules, it is very, very frequently in the judges’ minds when they read — which means, all too frequently, that if you offend their sensibilities, they will conclude that your work isn’t marketable enough to make it to the finalist round.

I introduced the change of subject too abruptly, didn’t I? As soon as I typed it, I heard good moods the world over deflate hissingly. Sorry about that.

Of course, this kind of my-view-equals-the-market stance isn’t precisely fair: we would all have different takes on what makes a book good, what sentiments are acceptable, and, perhaps most for the sake of the contest, different ideas of what is marketable.

However, there are a few simple ways you can minimize the possibility of alienating your garden-variety contest judge. And — wouldn’t you know it? — those measures just happen to be my subject du jour.

Judge-appeasing strategy #1: avoid clichés like the proverbial plague.

Clichés are AMAZINGLY common in contest entries, for some reason I have never understood — unless it is simply that clichés become clichés because they ARE common. You really do want to show contest judges phraseology and situations they’ve never seen before, so try to steer clear of catchphrases, stock characters, and tried-and-true plot twists. (You don’t mean…you’re my FATHER?!?)

Judge-appeasing strategy #2: minimize pop culture references.

In general, you should avoid pop culture references in contest entries, except as indicators of time and place. They tend to fall flat in both dialogue and narration, but are often very useful in description.

Why? Well, even the most optimistic judge would know that an unpublished work entered in a contest will be at least 2 more years on its way to publication — and thus the reference in question needs to be able to age at least that long.

In answer to that collective gasp I just heard from those of you new to the industry: books don’t typically hit the shelves for at least a year after the contract is signed — and that’s not counting the time the agent spends shopping the book around first. And that’s after the writer has found an agent for it in the first place.

So even if a cultural reference is absolutely hot right now, it’s going to be dated by the time it hits the shelves. For instance, do you really think that anyone will know in five years who Paris Hilton is, or why she was famous? (I’m not too sure about the latter now.)

Also, writers tend to underestimate how closely such references tend to be tied to specific eras, regions, and even television watching habits. Which brings me to…

Judge-appeasing strategy #3: NEVER assume that the judge will share your worldview.

Often, the writer’s age — or, at any rate, generational identification — is perfectly obvious from the cultural references used in a contest entry. That’s fine, especially for a memoir, but it’s not a good idea strategically to assume that the judges determining whether your work makes it to the finalist round share your background in any way.

Why? Well, nothing falls flatter than a joke that the reader doesn’t get, unless it’s a shared assumption that’s shared by a group to which the reader does not happen to belong.

In other words, it’s very common for contest entrants to assume (apparently) that the judges assessing their work are share their age group, sex, sexual orientation, views on foreign policy, you name it. So much so that they tend to leave necessary references unexplained.

And this can leave judges who do not happen to be like the entrant somewhat perplexed. Make sure that your story or argument could be followed by ANY English-reading individual without constant resort to the encyclopedia or MTV.

The best way to steer clear of potential problems: get feedback on your entry from a few readers of different backgrounds than your own, so you can weed out references that do not work universally. Recognize that your point of view is, in fact, a point of view, and as such, naturally requires elucidation in order to be accessible to all readers.

Judge-appeasing strategy #4: if you are taking on social or political issues, show respect for points of views other than yours.

This is really a corollary of the last. If you’re going to perform social analysis of any sort, it’s a very, very poor idea to assume that the contest judge will already agree with you. A stray snide comment can cost you big time on a rating sheet.

I’m not suggesting that you iron out your personal beliefs to make them appear mainstream — contest judges tend to be smart people, ones who understand that the world is a pretty darned complex place.

Yet you would be AMAZED at how many contest entries, particularly in the nonfiction categories, are polemics, and how often they use the argumentative tactics of verbal speech. But while treating the arguments of those who disagree with dear self as inherently ridiculous can work aloud (although it’s certainly not the best way to win friends and influence people, in my experience), they tend to work less well on paper.

So approach your potential readers with respect, and keep sneering at those who disagree with you to a minimum.
And watch your tone, particularly in nonfiction entries, lest you become so carried away in making your case that you forget that a member of your honorable opposition may well be judging your work.

This is a circumstance, like so many others, where politeness pays well. Your mother was right about that, you know.

Judge-appeasing strategy #5: recognize going in that you have absolutely no control over how an individual judge will respond to your work. All you can control is how you present it.

Trust me, you will be a much, much happier contest entrant if you accept that you cannot control who will read your work after you enter it into a contest. Sometimes, you’re just unlucky. If your romance novel about an airline pilot happens to fall onto the desk of someone who has recently experienced major turbulence and resented it, there’s really nothing you can do about it.

You recognize this dilemma, right? It’s precisely the same one queries and submissions to agencies face.

To revert to my favorite gratuitous piece of bad luck: if Millicent the agency screener has scalded her tongue on a too-hot latte immediately prior to opening your submission, chances are that she’s going to be in a bad mood when she reads it. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do about that.

Ultimately, you can have no control over whether the agency screener has had a flat tire on the morning she reads your manusript, any more than you can control if the agent reading it has just broken up with her husband, or if the editor has just won the lottery. All you can do approach the process with a sense of professionalism: make your work the best it can be, and keep sending it out until you find the reader who gets it.

Which brings me to…

Judge-appeasing strategy #6: don’t expect a single contest entry to make your writing career.

Okay, so this is really more about your happiness than the judges’, but do try to avoid hanging all of your hopes on a single contest. That’s giving WAY too much power to a single, unknown contest judge.

Yes, even if there is only one contest in your part of the world for your kind of writing. Check elsewhere.

And, of course, keep querying agents, magazines, and small presses while your work is being considered by a contest. (No, this is not a contest rule violation: contests almost universally require that a entry not be published prior to the entry date. You’re perfectly free to keep submitting after you enter it — and to enter the same work in as many contests as you choose.)

Judge-appeasing strategy #7: be alert for content and style expectations that may not match your writing.

As I mentioned during my earlier contest selection series, if a contest does not have a track record of rewarding your type of work, it’s just not a good idea to make it your single entry for the year — yes, even if the rules leave open the possibility that your kind of work can win. For instance, a certain contest in my area has a Mainstream Fiction category that also accepts literary fiction — and, until this year, accepted genre as well.

Care to guess how often writing that WASN’T literary has won in this category? Here’s a hint: for many years, the judges had a strong preference for work containing lots and lots of semicolons.

Still unsure? Well, here’s another hint: in this year’s description of the Mainstream Fiction category, they spent four paragraphs defining literary fiction. Including a paragraph specifying that they meant the kind of work that tended to win the Nobel Prize, the Booker Award, the Pulitzer…

In case that didn’t shake up those of you considering entering an honestly mainstream work, I should also add: there were only four paragraphs in the description.

This is yet another reason — in case, you know, you needed more — to read not only the contest rules very carefully, but the rest of a contest’s literature as well: skim a little too quickly, and you may not catch that contest organizers have given a hint to what kinds of work they want to see.

You know, something subtle, like implying that they expect their contest winners to be future runners-up for the Pulitzer.

Judge-appeasing strategy #8: be alert for expectations about content.

Personally, I don’t think an honest literary contest has any business dictating content, but a surprising number of them do, either overtly (in defining the categories) or covertly (in defining winning criteria for the judges). This is particularly true in short story and essay competitions, I notice. Indeed, in short-short competitions, it’s not at all uncommon for a topic to be assigned outright.

Read with care before you submit, because such contests assume that entrants will be writing work designed exclusively for their eyes.

This should not, I feel, ever be the expectation for contests that accept excerpts from book-length works. Few entrants in these categories write new entirely new pieces for every contest they enter, with good reason: it would be quixotic. Presumably, one enters a book in a contest in order to advance the book’s publication prospects, not merely for the sake of entering a contest, after all.

Because the write-it-for-us expectation does sometimes linger, make sure to read the category’s definition FIRST, before you enter work you have already written. If the category is defined in such a way that work like yours is operating at a disadvantage, your chances of winning fall sharply. So be careful with your entry dollar, and enter only those contests and categories where you have a chance of winning.

Judge-appeasing strategy #9: make sure that you’re entering the right category.

Stop laughing. Entrants make this mistake all the time — and it isn’t always the fault of poorly-defined categories.
Most of the time, miscategorization is an inadvertent error on the entrant’s part, rather than obfuscation on the part of the contest rules.

I would LOVE to report that entries never come in labeled for the wrong category, but, alas, sometimes they do — and contests almost never allow the judges to drop the entry into the correct category’s pile. So the judge is left to read the out-of-place entry, and to wonder: did the entrant just not read the category descriptions closely enough?

Often, this turns out to be precisely what happened.

This is not a time merely to skim the titles of the categories: get into the details of the description. Read it several times. Have a writer friend read it, then read your entry, to double-check that your work is in fact appropriate to the category as the rules have defined it.

This may seem like a waste of time, but truly, it’s in your best interests to make sure. I have seen miscategorized work disqualified — or, more commonly, given enough demerits to knock it out of finalist consideration right away — but never, ever have I seen an entry returned, check uncashed, with an explanation that it was entered in the wrong category.

Next time, I shall discuss category selection a bit more. In the meantime, if you’re working on an entry that due, say, next Friday, try not to panic. Yes, this is a complex task, but you’re a complex writer, aren’t you? You can do this.

Keep up the good work!

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

Telling your life story to the judge, part II

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

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

Let’s get back to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry.

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

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

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

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

Posted on - No Comments on The one text every literary contest entrant absolutely MUST read — and no, it’s not this blog post (but thanks for asking)

The one text every literary contest entrant absolutely MUST read — and no, it’s not this blog post (but thanks for asking)

Wouldn’t you know it? I spend days and days of blog time on how to do a synopsis for a contest entry, and I leave out the answer to one of the most basic possible questions: how does one number the pages?

That does it — today’s post is going to be on formatting contest entries.

Let me begin by answering the synopsis question before any of us get even a single minute older: it varies from contest to contest.

Most of the time, contests will simply specify that all pages of the entry should be numbered; some request that the synopsis or other support materials be numbered separately. If the rules say to number the synopsis sequentially with the rest of manuscript, by all means do so: if an entry consists of (in the order they appear) a title page, 24 pages of text, and a 3-page synopsis, the title page would be neither numbered nor counted, the text would be pp. 1-24, and the synopsis would be pp. 25-28. If they call for separate numbering, the title page and text would be the same, but the synopsis would start over at page 1.

Yes, you read that first part of the answer correctly: there is no standard answer to this, nor is there any substitute for going over the contest’s rules with the proverbial fine-toothed comb. In fact, I would HIGHLY recommend going through them with a fine-toothed comb, a nit-pick — and then making a checklist of ALL of the requirements, so you may check them off as you fulfill them.

Actually, if it were my entry, I would go a few steps farther: making the list, checking it twice for accuracy (à la the Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver) — then photocopying it a couple of times, and not only checking off each item as you complete it on List #1, but going back just before sealing the envelope with List #2, to make sure that you didn’t miss anything in the rush to get the entry envelope-ready.

And perhaps — this was clever reader Tad’s excellent suggestion from a while back — handing List #3 to your significant other, flat mate, tennis partner, or some other sharp-eyed soul who either loves you enough to do you an unpleasantly tedious favor or is otherwise too polite to say no, and ask him/her/them/it to go through and check your entry for required elements.

I’m not just talking about making sure that you actually INCLUDE that synopsis you slaved over for so long, either. I’m also referring to adhering to formatting requirements.

So if you were entering a contest that required a synopsis, your first stop should be to consult the rules, to see if there are special ways they would like to see it formatted. If they do, follow them to the letter.

Do this even if what they are asking is silly, unheard-of, or downright obsolete. Like, for instance, the Organization-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named’s yearly insistence that section breaks should be denoted by at least three centered asterisks, like this:

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Now, those asterisks are not entirely without reason: back in the days of typewriters, they were indeed how a writer alerted the manual typesetter to a section break. Now that publishing houses expect writers to turn manuscripts over to them after contract signing in both hard and soft copy, the asterisked section break has gone the way of the horse and buggy: it’s still POSSIBLE to get around that way, but folks on the highway are going to get a might annoyed with you.

So if you were submitting the same page to an agent or editor, you would be best served by its looking like this:

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Which only goes to reiterate the point that I keep banging upon, drum-like, every time I bring up the topic of contest entries: contrary to popular belief amongst writers, the sheets of paper you submit to a contest and to an agent or editor should not necessarily be identical.

Yes, you’re going to want to adhere to standard manuscript format, where the rules do not specifically call for something different; since standard format is in fact industry standard (thus the name), contest judges expect to see it. In fact, if an entry is NOT in standard format (other than the little tweaks the contest’s organizers have amused themselves by adding to the rules), it usually loses either presentation or marketability points.

Remember, the judges want the finalists’ work to be market-ready — which means in the format that agents and editors prefer.

Do I hear some disgruntled shifting of feet out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you mutter, “if they’re so hot on marketability, why don’t they just set up the rules so they’re identical with standard format and call it good?”

Ooh, good question, disgusted mutterers. If contest rules were set afresh every year, or even every decade, that would make abundant sense. Because, you see, contest organizers will frequently insist (in feedback, anyway) that the contest’s rules ARE standard format, even when — as in the case of the asterisks — that’s no longer true.

But the fact is, contest rules are NOT revised every year, generally speaking: in the vast majority of cases, the same rules have been used since the contest began, with additions as contest organizers thought of them, entrants objected, logical problems were noticed, and so forth. This is often true, incidentally, even of organizations who update their websites frequently.

I single out no PARTICULAR contest here, of course — but suffice it to say that if I were again entering a Contest-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named whose deadline is next week (on the 22nd, to be precise), I would not only go over the Rules and Guidelines section of their website with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, but also double-check the Category Definitions for EVERY category you intend to enter AND the entry form for minute differences.

I’m not saying that there’s a problem THIS year, of course. But still, it would be an excellent idea to triple-check, as there’s one less judge hanging around those parts who is aware of the problem to point it out to the others, if you catch my drift.

Because, realistically, if a contest judge duns you for not following a regulation that was not prominently displayed in the official rules, there’s not much you can do about it in retrospect. Think of it as the difference between the laws on the books and how a judge interprets them from the bench: you may be right in your interpretation, but the judge is the person in the room with the power to throw others in jail for contempt.

For all practical purposes, while you’re in his courtroom, his interpretation IS the law. This is why we have appellate courts.

Literary contests, however, do not have a Supreme Court to which writers may appeal. (Although it’s an interesting idea.) Unless a contest gives entrants feedback, it’s unlikely that you’d even find out what the particular charges against your entry were.

So read the rules (and all other relevant documents) CAREFULLY, follow them to the letter, and follow standard format where the rules do not specifically tell you what to do. (If you need a refresher on how manuscripts should be formatted, please see the rule-based STANDARD FORMAT BASICS and the more visually-based STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED categories at right. And please, if you have questions, ask — I’d much rather that you bring it up here than lose points on an entry.)

For those of you who are more conversant with standard format, let’s play a little game to show how differently an author, a regular reader, and a contest judge might view the same page of text. Here’s that first contest entry page again, an excerpt from EF Benson’s Mapp & Lucia: what’s wrong with it, from a judge’s point of view?

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Spot anything? Spot many things? (If you’re having trouble seeing the details of the text, try right-clicking on the image and saving it to your desktop.)

This is quite hard; I’ve set a multi-level test for you here. A few hints:

1) There’s an error that would be a disqualification-level offense for almost any contest,

2) a fairly universal pet peeve,

3) a common causer of knee-jerk reactions,

4) a couple of matters of style that would probably have lost Benson a crucial point or two, and

5) a more subtle problem that almost any professional reader would have caught, but most writers would not unless they were reading their own work out loud.

Here’s what the page would look like to a contest judge. The colored bits are the problems, one color per gaffe; I’ve backed up in the text a little, to make the more elusive problem clearer, so now it’s on two pages. (All the better to see standard format in action, my dear.) The one that would get the entry booted is in red.

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See ‘em more clearly now? Let’s go through the problems one by one:

1) In an entry, ANY reproduction of the author’s name usually results in instant disqualification. (Yes, even in a memoir.) So quadruple-check that slug line.

2) As the notes in orange point out, these paragraphs are pretty long, and do not necessarily break where the underlying thought does. Also, some of these sentences are pretty lengthy — okay, let’s just go ahead and use that dreaded term from English class, run-on sentence.

Contrary to popular opinion, run-on sentences do NOT make a narrative seem more conversational in tone, at least to your garden-variety contest judge: most of the time, they just look LONG. As do paragraphs more than half a page long. The average contest judge’s heart sinks at the first glimpse of either.

3) Notice the underlined bits in teal — there, the text has fallen into passive constructions. Like many Millicents, most contest judges respond to the passive voice with a negativity that most people reserve for rattlesnake bites, fender-benders, and telemarketing calls. In their minds, the passive voice is pretty much synonymous with poor writing.

It’s not fair, of course; plenty of good writers use the passive voice occasionally, because it can be darned useful. But that’s not an argument you’re going to win in a contest entry. Purge the passivity.

4) If you’re going to use semicolons (pink), make sure that you are using them correctly. In English, ; and is technically redundant, because a semicolon is an abbreviated form of comma + and. So a list should read: Jessamyn gathered armfuls of lavender; bushels of poppies; two thousand puppies, and a bottle of Spray-and-Wash.

Were you surprised to see then show up in color? Most contest entries overuse this word — which isn’t hard to do, as in print, if action A appears in the text prior to action B, it is always assumed that B followed A, unless the text gives some specific reason to believe otherwise. So then is almost always unnecessary, particularly in a list of actions.

5) See all of that blue? It looks like a sapphire inkwell came here to die — and that’s precisely what that much repetition of and looks like to a contest judge. It’s annoying to read, because it is so easy for the eye to stray accidentally from one line to the next. (For an explanation of why this phenomenon is so tiring to the eye, please see my former post on the subject.)

It’s not a bad idea to go through your contest entry with a highlighter, marking all of the ands, for where more than one appears per sentence, you will usually find run-ons. Had I mentioned that people who sign up to judge contests are usually sticklers for grammar?

I know, I know: people do use connective ands instead of periods in spoken English. That doesn’t mean it will work on the page. Trust me on this one — it DOES bug most professional readers and contest judges.

Did that vicious little run-down make you want to shove your contest entry back into the drawer to hide from human eyes? That would be understandable, but I choose rather to view this little exercise as empowering for a writer: your chances of polishing your work to contest-winning shininess is much, much higher if you know BEFORE you seal that envelope just how close a scrutiny the judges are likely to give it.

Is it shallow of me to like it when my readers win, place, and make the finals in contests? Possibly. But if judges react so strongly to textual problems like #2-5, how much more negatively are they likely to respond to an entry that breaks one of the contest’s rules?

Do not assume that your entry will be read by the laid-back, in other words. Read the rules, reread the rules, and FOLLOW THE RULES as if your life depended upon it. If you don’t find yourself waking in the night, muttering that under your breath, the night before you’re planning to drop your entry in the nearest mailbox, I can only advise that your first action the next morning should be to go back and DOUBLE-CHECK THAT YOU HAVE FOLLOWED THE RULES.

And then read the whole darned thing out loud, to weed out possible knee-jerk reaction-triggers. Like, for instance, the first two words of the previous sentence.

More tips to follow, of course. But a quick reminder to those of you who are planning to enter that contest with a deadline next week: my ruminations on entries will in fact be going on past that deadline, as I’m trying not to promote any individual contest this year. All of my trenchant observations on that particular contest from last year, when I was writing directly about it, are still available for your perusal under the CONTEST ENTRY PREP category at right.

Keep up the good work!

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That pesky contest synopsis, part V: the remains of the (caucus) day

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Well, my caucus day is finally over, and boy, is it odd to see the news reports reduce a thrilling, inspiring afternoon to a flat color on a map of the U.S.! Which isn’t even accurate in my state: we elected delegates for BOTH of the major candidates, thank you very much, not just for the one Wolf Blitzer keeps telling us won the entire state.

I volunteered to be my caucus’ secretary, which meant that my job was to document all of the twists and turns of everyone’s trying to figure out how proportional representation works. I know, I know: not really a task that required a professional writer’s hand, but hey, I get a kick out of seeing democracy in action.

The elementary school was SWAMPED, the rather acute parking situation exacerbated by the fact that some clever soul had scheduled the other party’s caucus ACROSS THE STREET, in a local high school, at the same time as several apparently fiercely-fought soccer games. If you’re willing to walk four blocks from your car just to convince someone who lives three houses away from you to support your candidate, you’ve got to be excited about electoral politics in a way that is rare in these decadent days.

My favorite moment: as we were cleaning up, a GORGEOUS 17-year-old (if you’ll be legal by election day, you can caucus here) brought over a stack of voter registration forms (heck, we’re so hospitable in Washington, you don’t even need to be registered to vote before caucusing! We’ll give you the forms, and we’ll provide the stamp!). She was glowing, because she had just been elected as a delegate to the county convention.

Naturally, as a former party hack (hey, someone has to write those platforms), I congratulated her winning the first elected office of her adult life. She burst into tears and threw her arms around me, cheering.

Imagine starting one’s adult political life like that. Long may it last, for all of the young people who are new to the process.

It reminded me of being at the national convention in 2000. Due to a freak accident during which a suddenly-turning cameraman, my body, and the convention floor abruptly made intimate, if not friendly, contact, I was sitting with my (broken, but we didn’t know that at the time) swollen ankle propped up on a chair near the press seats, explaining to a puzzled Russian journalist why the candidate had just been cheered for mentioning his mother, when I noticed that one of the security guards had tears rolling down her face. Believe me, when you sprain (we thought at the time) both of your ankles in the middle of a packed convention center, you make friends with the security guards, pronto. (My elevated gams also drew the attention of a very sweet cameraman with a pronounced foot fetish who worked for an East Coast newspaper which shall remain nameless, but that’s another story.)

Since I knew from previous conversations with this guard that she considered herself apolitical and the entire convention rather silly, I asked her why she was so moved. Apparently, on his way into the convention center, Gore had stopped and shaken hands with every single one of the security guards. She had grown up poor; it had never occurred to her that someone running for president might ever notice her existence.

And that, my friends, is a side of politics the media seldom covers.

Okay, that’s enough sentiment for today: back to work. Contest synopses ho!

Effectively, in a contest situation, the synopsis is the substitute for the rest of the book, right? It is where you demonstrate to judges that you are not merely a writer who can hold them in thrall for a few isolated pages: here is where you show that you have the vision, tenacity, and — chant it with me now — storytelling ability to take the compelling characters you have begun to reveal in your first chapter through an interesting story to a satisfying conclusion.

The synopsis, in short, is where you show that you can plot out a BOOK, baby.

For this reason, it is imperative that your synopsis makes it very, very clear how the chapter or excerpt you are submitting to the contest fits into the overall story arc of the book, regardless of whether you are submitting fiction or nonfiction.

Did I just notice many, many eyebrows shooting hairline-ward out there? “But Anne,” I seem to hear some of you asking, “isn’t that self-evident? Why would I be submitting anything other than the first chapter(s) of my book?”

Well, for starters: the rules. Quite a few contests allow writers to submit chapters other than the first. Still more do not explicitly specify: they merely tell the entrant to send X number of pages and a synopsis.

Sometimes, writers feel that their best writing falls in, say, Chapter 18; these writers might want to take advantage of such a loophole. However, if you elect to take them up on this offer, your synopsis had better make it absolutely plain where the enclosed excerpt will fall in the finished work.

Truth be told, I think it is seldom wise to submit either non-consecutive excerpts from a book or chapters other than the initial ones, even if later chapters contain writing that is truly wonderful. Non-consecutive excerpts require the judge to make the logical connections between them — which the judge may not be inclined to do in a way that is in your best interest.

An uncharitable judge might, for instance, draw the unkind inference that you had submitted the excerpts you chose because they were the only parts of the book you had written – a poor message to send in a category devoted to book-length works. Or that you simply can’t stand your introductory chapter.

Or, a judge may reason, no agent or editor in the world, is going to accept random excerpts from a book for which she’s been queried: she is going to expect to see the first chapter, or first three chapters, or some other increment up to and possibly including the entire manuscript. But no way, no how is an agent or editor going to ASK to see unrelated excerpts out of running order.

Well, okay, not unless the submitter is a celebrity for whom it would be a stunning surprise to the industry if s/he could string three coherent English sentences together. But in that case, the celebrity would be selling a platform more than the writing itself, right?

Since reputable contest judging is blind, this situation is unlikely to arise, anyway. So a judge might safely conclude that the author who submitted this patchwork entry isn’t anywhere near ready to submit work to professionals. In other words: next!

This is not, in short, a situation where it pays to rely upon the kindness of strangers.

If you DO decide to use non-contiguous excerpts, place your synopsis at the BEGINNING of your entry packet, unless the rules absolutely forbid you to do so, and make sure that the synopsis makes it QUITE clear that these excerpts are far and away the most important part of the book. Basically, the role of the synopsis in this instance is to make the judges EAGER to read THESE particular excerpts.

Obviously, this means that your storytelling skills had better be at their most polished, to meet the challenge. But really, why raise an already lofty bar even higher?

As for selecting a chapter other than the first for submission, effectively starting midway through the book, I would advise against it, too, even if when contest rules explicitly permit the possibility.

“But Anne,” I hear some of you point out, “the opening to my Chapter 58 knocked the socks off my mother, nearly slayed my writing teacher, and generally left my critique group in a state of panting incoherence. Are you saying that I SHOULDN’T loose that level of brilliance upon a contest judge?”

Before I answer that directly, let me acquaint you with some of the arguments against not beginning at the beginning in general. In the first place, the judge may well draw the same set of uncharitable inferences as with the non-continuous excerpts, and dismiss your submission as not ready for the big time.

Remember, they are typically judging marketability as well as writing quality. As I have mentioned repeatedly over the last couple of weeks, contest organizers LOVE it when their winners move on quickly to publication. If your submission looks like it needs a couple of years’ worth of polishing to become market-ready, it is unlikely to win a contest, even if you are extremely talented.

In the second place, while your best writing may well lie later in your book, the advantage of starting at the beginning of the book is that the judge and the reader will have an equal amount of information going in. To lay bare the secrets of the judging world, I’ve known a LOT of contest judges who resent having to go back and forth between the synopsis and the chapters to figure out what is going on.

There is a sneaky way to get around this – but I’m afraid I would have to scold you if you did it.

Here it is anyway: there is no contest in the world that is going to make you sign an affidavit swearing that your entry is identical to what you are submitting to agents and editors. If you win, no one is later going to come after you and say, “Hey, your book doesn’t start with the scene you entered in the contest!”

And even if someone did, so what? Professional writers change the running orders of their books all the time. And titles. And the name of the protagonist’s baby sister. Pretty much no one in the industry regards a manuscript as beyond revision until it is sitting on a shelf at Barnes & Noble.

With NF books that go into subsequent editions, not even then.

Thus, a clever entrant who feels her best writing occurs fifty pages into her novel might, for the purposes of competition, place her strongest scene first by starting the entry on page 50. Presenting it as page 1, of course.

The synopsis would have to be revised, naturally, to make it appear that this is indeed the usual running order of the book, and our heroine would have to edit carefully, to make sure that there is nothing in the skipped-over pages that is vital to understanding what happens in the chapters presented in the entry.

The job of the synopsis, then, in the hands of this tricky writer, would be to cover up the fact that the entry starts in the middle of the book. It would be just our little secret.

To put it in a less clever way: go ahead and submit your strongest chapter — but for heaven’s sake, do NOT label it as Chapter 8. Label it as Chapter 1, and write a new synopsis for a book where Chapter 8 IS Chapter 1. Just make sure that your synopsis is compelling and lucid enough that it makes sense as a story told in that order.

Are those eyebrows wiggling again? “But Anne,” some of you tireless running order-huggers maintain, “my story doesn’t make sense told out of order. Am I doomed to submit Chapter 1, just so the synopsis makes sense?”

Okay, come closer, and I’ll whisper a little secret that the pros use all the time: it’s perfectly acceptable in most fiction genres, and certainly in memoir, to open the book with a stunningly exciting scene that does not fall at the beginning of the story, chronologically speaking. It’s usually called a prologue, and it’s slapped onto the beginning of the book, before the set-up begins.

Does this seem a tad dishonest? It isn’t, really; it’s an accepted trick o’ the trade. If you trawl in bookstores much, you’ve probably seen this technique used in a novel or twelve lately. It’s become rather common in submissions, for the simple reason that a book that bursts into flame — literarily speaking — on page 1 tends to be a heck of a lot easier to sell to agents and editors than one that doesn’t really get going until page 27.

And that’s doubly true of contest entries, which judges are often reading for free and in their spare time.

Generally speaking, anything you can do to place your best writing within the first few pages of your contest entry, you should do. Judges’ impressions tend to be formed very fast, and if you can wow ‘em before page 3, you absolutely should.

Just as with work you submit to agents, the first page of your entry is far and away the most important thing the judges see — which is why, unless an entry features mid-book excerpts, the author’s platform is truly stellar, or the contest’s rules specify a particular order for the entry packet, I ALWAYS advice placing the synopsis AFTER the chapters, not before.

That way, your brilliant first page of text can jump out at the judges. (After the title page, of course.) And if you can include some very memorable incident or imagery within the first few paragraphs of your chapter, so much the better.

One final word to the wise: whatever you do, try not to save writing your synopsis for a contest for the very last moments before you stuff the entry into an envelope. Synopsis-writing is hard; budget adequate time for it. And make absolutely sure that the synopsis you submit supports the image of the book you want your submitted chapter to send.

Next time, I shall begin to cover the super-common entry mistakes that tend to raise even the most tolerant judges’ hackles, due to sheer repetition. Feel free to keep posting questions about synopses as you write them, though, and keep up the good work!

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That pesky contest synopsis, part IV: hold the phone!

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What a day this has been! What a rare mood I’m in! No, it’s not almost like being in love — it’s exactly like living in a caucus state the day before the big event. My telephone hasn’t rung this much since the days when my phone number was one digit off from my hometown’s most popular bar.

Why all the ringing? Why, so the recorded voices of people I have heard of and the live voices of people I haven’t may urge me to spend half a day tomorrow arguing with my neighbors at my local caucus, of course. All of a sudden, everyone in the other Washington can find Seattle on a map unassisted.

Heck, representatives from both major campaigns offered not only to give me directions to the elementary school where I will be caucusing; they offered to DRIVE me there.

To be fair, a certain amount of nagging is warranted in my neck of the woods — to attend my caucus is to take one’s life, and certainly one’s blood sugar, into one’s hands. Unlike a primary, where all the voter is asked to do is fill in a few bubbles, drop a form into a box, and go, caucus goers are expected to spend several HOURS holding forth on the relative merits of their chosen candidates.

While actual fisticuffs seldom occur, bullying often does; the last time I attended, my views on environmental preservation were challenged by a 6’5″, 400-pound ex-Marine willing — indeed, eager — to throw his considerable bulk in the direction of anyone who contradicted the views of the party leadership.

Since he was of the opinion that the merest discussion of any plank of the state’s platform, however minor, was tantamount to treason, a certain amount of physical intimidation was inevitable. I’ve seen him send entire salmon preservation leagues scurrying to the other side of the elementary school auditorium.

All the while, party volunteers proffer cookies, coffee, candy, coffee, hot dogs, coffee, Danish, coffee, brownies, coffee, and sometimes, in my neighborhood, a gigantic cake emblazoned with the iced likeness of our local baking maven’s choice for president. You should have seen it the year she went for Jesse Jackson.

Oh, heavens, there goes the phone again.

I’m back — now back to work.

It may seem odd that I hammered so hard yesterday about the importance of a finely-crafted synopsis to a contest entry’s overall chances of winning, but you would be astonished at how often a well-written chapter is accompanied by a synopsis obviously dashed off at the last minute, as though the writing quality, clarity, and organization of it weren’t actually being evaluated at all.

I suspect that this is a fairly accurate reading of what commonly occurs. All too often, writers (most of whom, after all, have full-time jobs and families and, well, lives to lead) push preparing their entries to the very last minute.

Frustrated at this crucial moment by what appears to be an arbitrary requirement — it’s the writing in the chapter that counts, right? — it’s tempting just to throw together a synopsis in a fatal rush and shove it into an envelope, hoping that no one will pay much attention to it.

Trust me on this one: judges WILL pay attention to it. Many a fine entry has been scuttled by a slipshod synopsis.

I won’t go so far as to say, of course, that if you do not expend careful consideration over the crafting of the synopsis for a book-length category, you might as well not enter at all. It is entirely fair to say, however, that if you have a well-written, well thought-out synopsis tucked into your entry packet, your work will automatically enjoy an edge toward winning.

I have a few more tips on how to increase that edge, of course — but while that darned phone keeps ringing every few minutes, I think my powers of concentration will be best spent on issues of format, rather than content.

I hadn’t realized it until reader Sheri asked a question about synopses the other day, but back in December, when I was posting examples of standard format, I somehow managed to neglect to include what a synopsis should look like. Today, I’m going to rectify that, for both contest and submission synopses.

First, let’s look at the first page of a synopsis one might submit to an agent:

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For the most part, as you may see, it simply adheres to standard manuscript format: one-inch margins all the way around, slug line in the top left margin, page number in the slug line, indented paragraphs, the works. (If you’re unclear on the hows and whys of standard manuscript format, or were unaware that such a thing existed, please see the STANDARD FORMAT BASICS category at right.)

Note, too, that the first time a character is introduced to the story, her name appears entirely in capital letters. That makes it easier for skimming eyes to follow — and if that seems like an invitation to screener laziness, bear in mind that Millicent and her compatriots are reading literally hundreds of pages per day. Their eyes are TIRED.

Do you want to be the writer who makes those eyes’ little lives easier or harder?

The title of the work is on the first line of the page, with the information that it is a synopsis on the second double-spaced line. Why state up front that it’s a synopsis? Well, remember a few months back, when I described that catastrophic collision between two interns in an agency hallway? Does “Hey, you got memoir in my thriller!” “No, you got thriller in my memoir!” ring a bell?

Since submitted manuscripts are unbound in any way, individual pieces of them tend to wander off on field trips of their own. Slug lines can go a long way toward allowing those hapless interns to piece the manuscripts back together.

Guess what? So can clearly labeled synopses.

For this reason, I like to label subsequent pages of the synopsis as such as well. It’s not strictly required, but hey, the subsequent pages are every bit as likely to go wandering as the first, right? The result looks like this:

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All clear on the format for the submission synopsis? May I suggest that this would be a dandy time to bring up questions, if not?

Okay, on to the contest synopsis. The primary difference is — anyone? Anyone?

Yes, that’s right: in a blind-judged contest (i.e., in the respectable ones that are worth your time and money to enter), the writer’s name cannot appear on any page of the entry. Not the first, and certainly not the last.

Obviously, this is going to affect the slug line, but it’s easily resolved. Lookee:

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See? Very simple. Notice any other differences?

If you are looking for purely cosmetic differences, there aren’t any, other than the slug line. However, on the content level, I did tighten up the synopsis a bit for the benefit of the contest judge.

Why, you ask? Because I happen to know (having read the contest rules as closely as I urge you all to do) that this contest accepts entries up to fifty pages long. Almost everything that happened within the first two pages of the submission synopsis occurs during the first fifty pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY.

The judge will most likely read the chapters before turning to the synopsis — that way, if the writing in the chapter is not good, they can skip the synopsis altogether. So why recap more than is necessary, especially if including a 4-page contest synopsis will allow Aunt Jane to include another page of text?

Seem rules-lawyerish? Exactly; contests are run by people who just adore rules. Go with the flow.

Next time, phone conditions permitting, I shall polish off the hot topic of contest synopsis-polishing. Happy caucusing, Washingtonians, Louisianans, and Nebraskans, and everybody, keep up the good work!

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That pesky contest synopsis, part III: an entry synopsis that stands out from the crowd, or, baa humbug

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Yes, the pun is a terrible one, but I’m in a giddy, hopeful mood today; specifically, I’m hoping that those rumors I’ve been hearing about an any-second-now settlement to the screenwriters’ strike are true. I’ve been hearing them from increasingly credible sources all week; if you picture an Oscar statuette whispering in my ear today, you wouldn’t be far off. Fingers crossed for all of those talented people getting back to work on reasonable terms.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been talking about how and why a successful contest synopsis and a killer submission synopsis can and should be different. I have to say, I had expected to hear a little more groaning from the peanut gallery about this — I am, after all, suggesting that you write a 3 – 5 page summary of your book for contest submission that you will pretty much never be able to use for any other purpose on God’s decreasingly green earth.

See? Nothing. You people must be getting desensitized to the idea that reading this blog may lead to more work for you.

Frankly, I think that nonfiction entrants typically have a harder time producing a winning synopsis — or perhaps I merely think that because I have more often been a judge in nonfiction than fiction categories. For fiction, the task at hand is a bit closer to writing a submission synopsis: tell a good story in a reasonable amount of juicy detail.

If this sounds vaguely familiar to those of you who suffered through last summer’s Book Marketing 101 series, you have an excellent memory: this is more or less the goal of the 2-minute pitch as well.

You would be AMAZED how few contest synopses-writers seem to realize that the point is to tell a terrific story, though. Seriously, in my experience, usually under 10% of the entries include synopses that indicate storytelling ability, rather than going through a rote exercise in summarization.

Where do the other 90% go wrong, you ask?

As I explained yesterday, all too often, writers just state the premise of the novel, rather than taking the reader through the plot, blow by blow. If the plot has twists and surprises, so should the synopsis. Show the story arc, and make it compelling enough that the judge will scrawl on the evaluation sheet, “Wow, I want to read this book when it comes out.”

Trust me, pretty much every contest winner and placer’s evaluation sheet has this sentiment, or something very similar to it, scrawled upon it in a judge’s hand. So make it your mission in the synopsis to evoke that wonderful response.

Yes, I know: it’s a tall order. But don’t forget that the synopsis is every bit as much an indication of your writing skill as the actual chapters that you are submitting. Both need to be compelling reads that draw the reader into the story you’re telling.

The easiest way to get the judges involved is not merely to summarize the plot as quickly as possible but to give the feel of a number of specific scenes. Don’t be afraid to use forceful imagery and strong sensual detail, and try to have the tone of the synopsis echo the tone of the book.

Yes, you read that correctly, too: a good synopsis should be written in the same voice as the book, for both contest and for submission. Changes the way you think of the synopsis, doesn’t it?

Again, this should sound familiar to some of you: a good pitch conveys the same tone as its book, too.

So if you’re writing a comedy, you had better make sure that the judge at least chuckles a couple of times while reading your synopsis — and, word to the wise, as nothing is more stale than a joke told twice with a ten-minute period, repeating the same funny line in both chapter and synopsis is not the best means of invoking hilarity.

A sexy book deserves a sexy contest synopsis, too, and a thriller’s synopsis had better be, well, thrilling. If your horror synopsis doesn’t make the reader blanch (try it out on strangers in a coffeeshop), add gory details until it does.

And so forth. You’re a writer; you’re good at this sort of thing.

For nonfiction, the assignment is slightly less straightforward: yes, you need to make it plain that you’re a good arguer making an intriguing argument, but it would also behoove you to include certain elements of the book proposal that you would never include in a submission synopsis.

Some indication of the target market, for instance. A passing reference to why your book is better at conveying this set of information than anything currently on the market. A miniscule tease about how the publication of THIS book, as opposed to any other entered into the contest, will make the world just a little bit better for those who read it.

Why shouldn’t you include these in a synopsis sent along with requested materials? For starters, it’s redundant with the both the book proposal and, most likely, with the query letter as well.

Think about it. You might, if an agent’s listing or website asked for it, include a synopsis with your query letter, but really, if you’re going to make the case that the agent should drop everything and read your book proposal, the argument belongs in your query letter. (For tips on how to construct this type of case, please see the HOW TO WRITE A QUERY LETTER category on the list at right.)

You MIGHT be asked to send a synopsis along with requested materials, but for nonfiction, an agent or editor is far more likely to ask to see the entire book proposal — which, naturally, would include entire sections on who the target audience is, why they would benefit from your book, and how your book is different and better than anything remotely similar currently on the market. (For some insights on the various necessary components of a NF book proposal, please see — you guessed it — the BOOK PROPOSAL category at right.)

For a memoir, admittedly, an agent is slightly more likely to ask to see the first couple of chapters plus a synopsis, but still, most memoirs, like other nonfiction, are sold on proposals, not the entire manuscript. (And no, I’m not sure why there are so many sources out there that say otherwise. I’ve sold two memoirs to publishers without having written more than the first chapter and a proposal for either.)

But as I mentioned yesterday, the trick to a memoir synopsis, for a contest or submission, is much closer to the goal for fiction: it needs to sound like a great yarn well told. What it does NOT need to be and should not be is an extended discussion of why you decided to write a memoir in the first place.

For some reason, it is hugely common in contest synopses for memoirists (and sometimes other NF writers as well) to treat the synopsis as though it were a response to an impassioned crowd storming their writing spaces, demanding to know who the heck the author is, to think he has the right to think his pet topic might interest even a single other human being, let alone thousands or millions. Defensive does not even begin to describe it.

A LOT of contest synopses go off on these tangents, to the detriment of the entry, and it costs them a plethora of presentation and professionalism points. Which means, unfortunately, that an experienced judge’s knee-jerk response to a synopsis that engages in this practice even a little tends to be exaggerated.

Yes, I am saying what you think I’m saying: “Next!”

“Wait just a minute!” I hear some of you out there saying. “Why is personal revelation regarded as a sign of a lack of professionalism? In a memoir, I would think that it would be downright desirable. Why aren’t my reasons for writing my own life story worth mentioning in the contest synopsis?”

It’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? In the eyes of the industry, though, there are only a few contexts where a lengthy discussion of why you chose to write a book is considered appropriate professional behavior:

(1) Within a nonfiction book proposal, where it is a necessary component to making the argument that you are uniquely qualified to write the book you are proposing. There, you may state your case in market terms in the section dedicated to that purpose.

(2) In a query letter or pitch, to show that you are uniquely qualified to write the book you are pitching. There, you may indulge in this impulse for as long as a couple of sentences.

(3) After you have signed with your agent, when she asks, “So, are there hidden selling points in this book that I should mention while I’m marketing it?” At that point, you may discourse for as long as it takes for the agent to drink a cup of coffee — or until her other line rings, whichever comes first.

(4) To your publisher’s marketing department just before your book is released, so they can include any relevant points in the press packet. They will be far more interested in your listing the addresses, phone numbers, and websites of every bookstore where any local might recognize your mug, but they’re going to want you to come up with a nice sound bite about why you wrote the book as well.

(5) Within the context of an interview AFTER the book is released. Interviewers LOVE hearing about writers’ motivations — which, I suspect is why aspiring writers so often want to tell everyone they see what is and is not autobiographical in their novels. So you can go to town after the book comes out.

(6) When you are chatting with other writers about why they wrote THEIR books. You can basically do this for the rest of your life.

Other than those few occasions, it’s considered over-sharing — yes, even for memoirists. In a contest entry, it is NEVER considered anything but self-indulgent.

Just don’t do it. In your contest synopsis, stick to the what of the book, and save the whys for later.

The only exception to this in a contest entry is if you have some very specific expertise or background that renders your take on a subject particularly valid. If so, make sure that information is stated within the first paragraph of your NF synopsis.

If you are writing a novel, and you feel that you have an inside perspective that simply MUST be mentioned to the judges, go back and reread that list above three more times. If you are still wedded to the idea after that, imagine me sighing gustily — then stick the information at the end of the synopsis, where it won’t be too intrusive.

For nonfiction, keep reminding yourself that your goal in a contest synopsis is threefold:

A) to show the argument of the book in some detail, along with some indication of how you intend to prove your case,

B) to show that the book will appeal to a large enough market niche to make publishing it worthwhile, and

C) to demonstrate that you are the best-qualified person in the universe to write the book.

In 3-5 pages, no less. Piece o’ proverbial cake, right?

In pursuit of Goal A, it is 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. Even if you are writing a self-help book, history book, or memoir, you are always making a case when you write nonfiction, if only to argue that your take on the world around you is interesting, unique, and valid.

Make absolutely certain that by the time a judge finishes reading your synopsis, s/he will understand very clearly what this argument is – and what evidence you will be bringing in to demonstrate it. (Statistics? Extensive background research? Field experience? Interviews? A wealth of personal anecdotes? Etc.)

In doubt about whether you’ve pulled this off successfully? Hand your synopsis to an intelligent non-specialist in your area (intelligent adolescents are great for this), have him or her read it — then ask the reader to summarize the argument for you without looking at the paper. Take notes on what parts come back to you fuzzily: those are the parts of the synopsis that need work.

If you are pinched for space in your entry, you need only devote the first paragraph to marketing information. State outright why the world needs your book. If you are writing on a subject that is already quite full of authorial opinion, make it plain why your book is different and better. As in:

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 snowboarding enthusiasts, MOUNTAINS MY WAY is the first to be written by a geologist.

If you have statistics on your prospective market, this is the place to mention them, as you would in a query letter or book proposal. Remember, one of the things that the judges are evaluating is the book’s marketability — how likely is a judge who thinks your target market is a quarter of its actual size to give you high marks? Go ahead and minimize this possibility:

There are currently 2 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.

The third desiratum is what is known in the industry as your platform. Admittedly, it is a trifle hard to explain why you are THE expert best qualified to write this book without saying a little something about yourself, so you may feel as though you are slipping into the realm of author bio, a potentially dangerous strategy in a contest where you might get disqualified for inadvertently mentioning your first name.

But rest assured, no one is going to disqualify you for mentioning that you have a Ph.D. or went to a specific culinary school. Go ahead and state your qualifications – just don’t slip up and mention yourself by name. As in:

A well-respected Seattle area caterer for twenty years, the author has extensive experience in crafting meals for the pickiest of eaters.

SHELLFISH AND YOU is the fruit of many years of postdoctoral research. The author, a graduate of the prestigious Scripps School of Oceanography, is recognized worldwide as an up-and-coming authority on mollusk behavior.

If your head is whirling from all of this – and whose wouldn’t be? — don’t worry. I’ll go into some tips on how to simplify the contest-writing synopsis process tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

(PS: today’s photo appears courtesy of FreeFoto.com.)

Posted on - No Comments on That pesky contest synopsis, part II, or Synopsis #1 ? Synopsis #2

That pesky contest synopsis, part II, or Synopsis #1 ? Synopsis #2

Or, to put it graphically:
01_01_53-vulture_web.jpg is not the same fowl as 01_01_7_thumb.jpg

What, you ask, am I talking about? Well, last time, I began talking about the differences between a synopsis that an aspiring writer might submit along with a query or requested pages and one that works well in a contest submission. Although they are called by the same name, they actually serve different purposes, so it’s in your best interests to craft them differently.

Hey, both vultures and peacocks are birds, but you don’t expect them to move from Point A to Point B precisely the same way, do you? Would you feed a peacock Vulture Chow?

Of course not. You’d feed it Peacock Yummies.

Because I had gone over the ins and outs of constructing the former type fairly recently (a series of posts gathered for your reading pleasure under the HOW TO WRITE A SYNOPSIS category in that long list at right), I leapt right into the contest version last time with nary a backward glance. But perhaps that was a tad abrupt.

Let me back up for a moment and define synopsis, for those of you new to the term:

SYNOPSIS, n.: A brief exposition in the present tense of the plot of a novel or the argument of a book. Typically, synopses run from 1-5 pages (double-spaced), depending upon the requirements of the requesting agent, editor, or contest.

In other words, it’s our old bugbear, a coolclips_wb024789.gif

That’s going to be true, incidentally, no matter the context in which it is requested. But, unlike many of the other hoops through which aspiring writers need to jump through on the way to landing an agent, the ability to write a strong synopsis is a skill that’s going to serve you well for your entire literary career.

That’s right, folks: even the long-agented and often-published still need to write ‘em occasionally. Might as well learn to do it well.

Because, after all, no one likes a synopsis that just lies there like a dead trout. Except, perhaps, our friend the vulture.

Now, obviously, it’s a tough task to summarize a 400-page book in just a few pages — no one contests that. You’re going to need to cover that plot with dispatch. But that doesn’t necessarily mean being vague or leaving out eye-catching details.

In both types of synopsis, most fiction writers make the mistake of summarizing the plot in generalities, rather than giving a brief overview of the major conflicts of the plot through a series brief, vividly described scenes redolent with juicy concrete details. The latter is definitely more memorable — which is definitely a great trait in a synopsis.

Not clear on the difference? Let’s take a gander at a fairly typical opening paragraph for a synopsis:

JACQUELINE (42) is experiencing severe problems in her life: a boss who alternately seems to hate and praise her, a father who calls all the time to grill her about her love life, and a wacky neighbor who is constantly knocking on her door to borrow things. She feels like she’s going out of her mind until she meets the man of her dreams, an architect whose bedroom eyes make her swoon, but who may already have a wife. After a series of disturbing “chance” meetings with Josh, she finds that it’s easier to accept a temporary demotion than to keep on fighting battles on all fronts.

Okay, let me ask you: how many lines into that summary did your attention start to wander? How many lines before you started to become confused about what was going on? And if you made it all the way to the end, did you find yourself wondering whether Josh was the architect, the boss, or the neighbor?

Good; you’re thinking like an agency screener. And like a contest judge.

The primary reason that this excerpt doesn’t hold the attention is that it’s stuffed to the gills with generalities and clichés. But a synopsis does not need to present a story with either. Take a look at the same story, summarized with a bit more pizzazz and a lot more specifics:

Freshly-divorced graphic designer JACQUELINE (42) is finding it hard to sleep these days. Staying awake isn’t much of a picnic, either. Her boss, ALBERT (87) cannot seem to make it through a staff meeting at the magazine without criticizing her layouts while running a warm, greasy hand up her stockinged thighs under the conference table.

You already want to read this book, don’t you? That’s because the details are compelling and unusual. Let’s see where else dialing back the vague helps us:

Every morning at precisely 9:24, her habitually-marrying father (OWEN, 67) telephones her at work to see if she met Mr. Right the night before — and when she sheepishly says no, he regales her with tales of his latest paramour. Even her nights are disturbed by her lonely neighbor, CLIVE (24), who can’t seem to make it past midnight without scratching on her door to ask to borrow something — her milk, her hairdryer, her cat.

She manages to run carefully-balanced chaos of her life runs with relative smoothness until dreamy, suspender-wearing architect JOSH (48) comes to measure her office for long-overdue renovations. But is does that untanned line on his left ring finger mean that he, too, is recently separated, or that he’s the kind of rat who slips his wedding ring into his pocket every time he comes within smoldering range of an attractive woman?

Yes, this second synopsis is a trifle longer, but aren’t those few extra lines worth it, when they give the story so much more oomph?

Oomph is, after all, important in a contest entry. A contest judge, like our old friend Millicent the agency screener, typically reads quite a few entries within a single sitting. If you want yours to end up in the pile with the finalists, you’re going to want that judge to remember the STORY of your book, as well as the quality of the writing.

Remember them for positive reasons, that is. If your synopsis doesn’t make the judge make a mental note to rush out and buy that book the nanosecond it hits the shelves, it may be lacking in the oomph department.

Do I see a raised hand or two out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you asking, “wouldn’t everything you’ve just said be applicable to either a submission OR a contest synopsis? I thought we were talking this week about contest synopses specifically.”

Good point, ethereal questioners. Yes, these principles would apply equally well to either type of synopsis. However, for a contest synopsis, since you will also be submitting the opening of the book — even if the rules merely say that you should include A chapter, rather than Chapter 1, you’re pretty much always going to be better off submitting the beginning — you can get away with covering those early pages only very lightly in the synopsis.

Actually, since those opening 10 pages (or 15, or 25) are all that the judges are going to see of the book, it is justifiable to streamline the plot more than you might for a regular synopsis. If you can make a better, more vivid story by sticking to only the book’s primary plotline (which, in a short synopsis of a long novel, is often the case), go ahead. The point of the contest synopsis, after all, is to wow the judges with what a great storyteller you are, not to reproduce every twist, turn, and minor character’s angst.

This may feel a touch misleading, but after you are wearing the first place ribbon, no one is going to come running up to you crying, “Hey! Your synopsis left out three major plotlines, and didn’t mention the protagonist’s sister! Foul! Foul!”

Trust me on this one.

For memoir, it’s especially important to streamline the story, since the number one problem that most memoir entries present is a tendency to include a little too much information extraneous to the primary plotline. For the synopsis, hit only the dramatic high points — and make sure to give some indication of how the main character grows and changes throughout the book.

Oh, and avoid making the common mistake of mentioning in either a contest or submission synopsis that the story being told is TRUE. Actually, you should eschew it in a query, too: in publishing circles, all nonfiction is assumed to be based upon truth.

Just ask James Frey.

Seriously, the true memoir is as much of an industry pet peeve as the fiction novel or the nonfiction how-to book. To the ears of the industry, all of these terms are redundant.

For other non-fiction entries, you’re going to want to reproduce the basic argument of the book in the synopsis. Starting with a thought-provoking question (“In a society as complex as America’s, why isn’t there more social acceptance of squirrel-lovers?”), then moving on to why the question is important enough to answer is often a good start. Present the essential planks of your argument in logical order, and give some indication of the kind of evidence you intend to use to back it up.

But again, remember to be SPECIFIC in your overview, not vaguely general.

I hear some throat-clearing out there. “Um, Anne? Again, dandy advice for either kind of synopsis, but how should I handle NF in a contest synopsis in particular?”

Tenacious, aren’t you? I can refuse you nothing, so here goes.

In a contest synopsis, it is usually a good idea to include some brief indication of the target market and why your book will serve that market better than what is currently available — essentially, a free taste of the argument that you will be making in your book proposal.

Do keep it short and to-the-point, though. Hyperbole does not work well in this context, so steer clear of grandiose claims (Everyone in North America will want to buy this book!) and stick mostly to saying what the book is ABOUT.

But most of all, make sure that the synopsis makes the book sound like a great read.

As with a novel, the way to achieve this in just a few pages may well involve leaving out some of the less important planks of your argument. Do not feel compelled to give the chapter-by-chapter summary as you would in a book proposal. Just because you have a chapter on the spiritual life of tadpoles in your book on frogs doesn’t necessarily mean than a description of it will read well in a contest synopsis.

Here again, we see that a single book may benefit from having one version of the synopsis that goes out to agents, and another, more streamlined one that gets tucked into contest entries. Different contexts — and sometimes even different contests — may call for different approaches.

Flexibility, after all, is as important a part of the writer’s tool bag as the ability to write an eye-catching opening paragraph. Don’t worry that a judge is going to assume that you don’t understand how to write a submission synopsis — this is a bird of another color, and everyone concerned understands that.

No one familiar with the vulture and the peacock would expect them to flap their wings in exactly the same manner or emit the same sounds, right?

Next time, I shall give a few more pointers on how to make that synopsis appeal a bit more to contest judges — and for those of you who are visually-oriented, I shall be showing examples of how a synopsis should be formatted later in the week. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on That pesky contest synopsis, where once again we see the value of that old literary bugbear, show, don’t tell

That pesky contest synopsis, where once again we see the value of that old literary bugbear, show, don’t tell

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I’ve spent the last week plus talking about the various types of literary contest that an agent-seeking writer might conceivably want to enter. As a freelance editor and not infrequent contest judge myself, I’m eager to move on to the nitty-gritty, how to make the small tweaks that often make the difference between reaching the finalist round and not — and avoiding the big mistakes that scuttle most entries before the end of page 2.

Not that I’m ambitious or anything.

Since I’m not gearing this series to a particular contest’s deadline, as I did last year (for the reasons behind that decision, please see my January 22 post), I’m going to put off discussion of the small points to concentrate for a few days on an aspect of contest entry that seems to frustrate nearly every entrant: the synopsis.

Why? Well, if you are entering a category that covers book-length material, you will pretty much always be asked to submit a synopsis — and since contest rules often specify an overarching page limit intended to cover both the submitted chapter and a synopsis for the whole book, many entrants yield to the temptation to skimp on this important part of the contest puzzle.

To summarize what promises to be several days’ worth of advice in a word: DON’T.

Contrary to widely-held writerly belief, a synopsis typically weighs MORE heavily in a contest entry’s success than in a submission to an agency’s, not less. Not to give away trade secrets or anything, but synopses tucked inside submission packets are not even always read — generally speaking, our pal Millicent the agency screener reserves that honor for those manuscripts she reads in their entirety.

Which is to say: not very many.

But the synopsis that accompanies a contest entry virtually always receives some critical attention.

Last September, just before I slid into the wonderland of glee that is mononucleosis, I spent a couple of weeks on how to write a stellar synopsis for querying agents. (Now well hidden under the startlingly opaque category title HOW TO WRITE A SYNOPSIS. Why oh why do I not make these things easier to track down?)

Unless any of you kick up a hue and cry, demanding that I revisit the issue now (anyone? Anyone?), I’m going to proceed on the assumption that most of you have already mastered the basics of writing an (ugh) synopsis. Now, I would like to focus on the differences between a synopsis that might wow an agent and one that might impress a contest judge.

In answer to that vast unspoken question my readership just flung in my general direction: yes, I am indeed suggesting that you write a separate synopsis to accompany contest entries.

Before you rend your garments and trouble heaven with your bootless cries on the subject of all of the extra work I tend to suggest above the bare minimum, hear me out. I’ve seen a LOT of otherwise excellent contest entries scuttled by bad synopses.

Bad how? Well, most entries read as though their authors regarded them as — get this — an annoying nuisance to be tossed off as quickly as humanly possible, generally in as few pages as feasible. Exactly as if the writing there were not being judged, too, in addition to the writing in the submitted chapter.

Did I just hear about 5,000 of you suck in your breath sharply in surprise? A surprisingly high percentage of entrants seem to be unaware that the synopsis is part of the writing being evaluated in a contest, just as in a submission.

I’ve said it before, and I shall no doubt say it again: every word of your writing that passes under the eyes of a professional reader is a writing sample.

Treat it accordingly.

Another common mistake is to submit a too-terse synopsis, presented in what is essentially outline form. (Sometimes, writers present it literally in outline format, believe or not.) Short on the sensual details and plot twists that enliven a story, they give no indication that the author is a talented storyteller. Just that s/he is darned good at making lists.

See my note above about every word of an entry being a writing sample.

Bearing that in mind might help a hopeful entrant from avoiding the frequent fault of repeating entire phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs from the entry itself. Trust me, judges are born nit-pickers: they’re going to notice.

(As will Millicent the agency screener, incidentally; it’s one of her predictable pet peeves.)

It’s also becoming increasingly common to conflate a screenplay synopsis — which typically has separate categories for action and major characters — with a literary synopsis, which is a linear, one-piece narrative concerned with plot for fiction and argument for nonfiction.

Remember how I mentioned yesterday that there are certain problems that prompt judges to slide an entry prematurely into the non-finalist pile as soon as they appear? This is one of ‘em.

Why? Well, such a synopsis makes it so very apparent that the entrant has not learned the norms of the literary world — and as I mentioned last time, one of the things being evaluated in a literary contest is a book’s marketability. To put the prevailing logic bluntly, the vast majority of judges will prefer an entry that is professionally presented — that is, one that adheres to standard format and resembles what a top-notch agent would expect to see in a successful submission — over even a brilliantly-written submission that does not conform with these standards.

Or, to put it another way, with many, many good entries, few judges are going to be willing to waste finalist space on an entry that flouts the expectations of submission. They want to promote writing that has a fighting chance in the marketplace.

Seriously, I’ve seen this criterion included on judges’ rating sheets.

Another type of synopsis that tends to elicit this knee-jerk reaction is the one that does not summarize the plot or argument of the book at all. Instead, it reads like promotional copy: This is the best book about the undead since Interview with the Vampire! This cookbook will change cuisine as we know it!

Or, even more common: This is the moving, insightful, beautifully written story of two kids in love.

Clearly, the entrant has confused a synopsis with a back-jacket promotional blurb. Judges are seldom amused by this, for precisely the same reason that Millicent tends not to be: they want to make up their own minds about how good/important/marketable a piece of writing is, not have it announced to them.

Once again, an old nag from the writing advice stable may be trotted out to admonish us all: show, don’t tell, the high quality of your writing.

The final frequent strategic error is also often seen in submissions to agencies: devoting virtually the entire synopsis to the premise of the book, often to the exclusion of the major conflicts of the book or the ending.

The usual authorial justification for this, of course, is I don’t want to give the ending away. Understandable, of course — were these writers not asking the judges to recognize the high quality of a book that they’re not going to read in its entirety.

Surely, it isn’t SO unreasonable for the judges to want to be provided with proof that the author has at least thought through the ending of the book, as well as the beginning?

Of course, any entrant is free to interpret the synopsis requirement as s/he pleases, but it’s only fair to tell you that in every contest I’ve judges, none of these synopses would have made it to the semifinalist round, much less been seriously considered for the top prize.

As if all that weren’t enough to make even the bravest first-time contest entrant tremble like a leaf at composition time, contest synopses often need to be shorter than submission synopses — which means that writing them is often harder.

Why harder? Well, most contest entries set absolute maximum page limits, which means page space will be at a premium. For instance, if the chapter you want to submit is currently 23 pages long, and the page limit (exclusive of title page, which is never counted in a contest’s maximum page count) is 25, you’re either going to need to shorten your already-existing synopsis to 2 pages or make some serious cuts to your chapter to permit something longer.

Guess which option most contest entrants pick?

Yep, you guessed it: contest judges see many, many single-page synopses. Unless the contest rules actually call for it to be that short, however, those synopses tend to lose style points for the entry — because, after all, it’s pretty hard to tell the story of a reasonably complex book within a couple of dozen lines of text.

Even if the contest rules specify an absurdly short synopsis (or make it sound shorter by calling it a plot outline), PLEASE do not give into the quite substantial temptation to fudge a little to stay within the specified parameters. Even if you have been asked to produce a 3-paragraph synopsis of a 500-page book, DO NOT single-space it, shrink the print size, or fudge the margins to make it fit within the specified limits, unless the contest rules say you may.

Why am I being so adamant about this? Simple: if you do it, you will get caught and penalized.

It’s kind of a no-brainer for the judge, actually. Trust me, if the rest of your entry is in 12-point Times New Roman with 1-inch margins, double-spaced, almost any judge is going to be able to tell right away if your synopsis is presented differently.

Because judges are expected to rate entries for professional presentation, unless contest rules specify otherwise, NEVER allow a contest synopsis to run over 5 pages or under 2.

Why those limits? A synopsis that is much shorter will make you look as if you are unable to sustain a longer exposition; if it is much longer, you will look as though you aren’t aware that a 3- to 5-page synopsis is fairly standard in the industry.

If this is starting to sound a bit repetitious, congratulations — you’ve grasped a fundamental truth about literary contests. An entry’s synopsis, just like its chapter(s), is subject to judging for clarity, coherence, marketability…and professionalism.

Which is why a synopsis that reads like a SYNOPSIS is almost always going to receive higher points than one that sounds like a back-jacket blurb (My writing teacher says this is the best novel since THE SUN ALSO RISES!) or an exposition on why the author chose to write the book (It isn’t autobiographical, but…).

Instead, if you are entering fiction, make sure that the novel sounds engaging, marketable — and like the best yarn since TREASURE ISLAND. For a memoir, ditto. And for other nonfiction, present the argument as fascinating and rigorously supported.

But use the synopsis to SHOW that your book is all of these things, not to tell about it.

Admittedly, that’s a fairly tall order. Don’t worry, I shall be giving some tips o’ the trade in the days to come, to give your synopsis some platform heels. Perhaps even a ladder, to enable it to stand head and shoulders above the other entries.

Before that metaphor falls of its own weight, I’m going to sign off for the day. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Picking the right literary contest for you, part VII: why not choose to jump through only the NON-flaming hoops?

Picking the right literary contest for you, part VII: why not choose to jump through only the NON-flaming hoops?

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Welcome back to my resumption of the absorbing topic of literary contests. Later this week, I shall be going over how to write the synopsis that virtually every contest that accepts book-length work requires. After that, I shall be going into fine detail about technical tweaking you can give your entries that will make them more likely to end up in the finalist pile.

But today, I want to finish up my series of questions you should ask yourself about a contest before you invest your time, money, and hope in entering.

In my last post, I discussed the pitfalls of contests that require entrants to devote extensive time to filling out entry forms, especially those that require information that should be positively irrelevant in a blind-judged contest. (Personal references? Huh?)

I neglected to mention, however, a potentially time-consuming side effect of entry that usually takes its toll long after the judging is over: do be aware that every time you fill out one of these forms, you are giving tacit consent to being placed upon the sponsoring organization’s mailing list. And that many, many nonprofit organizations (as runners of literary contests and conferences tend to be) scare up additional scratch for their operating expenses by selling their mailing lists.

Oh, come on — did you think those offers from Writers Digest and The Advocate just found their way into your mailbox magically?

The moral: just because a contest is literary doesn’t mean that its organizers aren’t making money on it. If you don’t want to be placed on mailing lists, add a letter to your entry saying so.

Also, as with any information you submit to people you do not know, be careful not to provide any data that is not already public knowledge. Every piece of information you share here is subject to resale to marketing firms, unless the contest sponsor states outright on the form that it will not do so.

But that is a minor consideration, and a long-term one; we were talking about the up-front costs of entering a contest, weren’t we?

Here’s a good rule of thumb: you can save yourself a lot of time if you avoid contests that make entrants jump through a lot of extraneous hoops in preparing a submission.

Some of these requirements have to be seen to be believed. In the last year, my aged eyes have beheld demands for:

coolclips_wb024789.gifSpecific typefaces that differ from the ones required by standard manuscript format.

coolclips_wb024789.gifFancy paper (three-hole punched, anyone?).

coolclips_wb024789.gifBizarre margin requirements, such as two inches on the left and 3/4 inch on the right — or vice versa.

coolclips_wb024789.gifExpensive binding, binders, or printing that a writer could not perform at home.

coolclips_wb024789.gifAn unprintable entry form that must be sent away for with a SASE — presumably because the contest organizers have yet to hear of the Internet — and needs to be filled out by typewriter, rather than by hand.

Does anyone out there still OWN a typewriter?

Even if you do, each of these will eat up your time and money, without the end result’s being truly indicative of the quality of your work. Because, really, all conforming to such oddball requirements truly demonstrates is that an entrant can follow directions. (Which, admittedly, is something that an agent or editor might legitimately want to know about a writer s/he was considering signing.)

I’m sorry to shock anyone, but my notion of a literary contest is one where the entrant proves that she can WRITE, not that she can READ.

But I suppose that could be my own absurd little prejudice, like my belief that gravity should make things fall down, not up.

I don’t enter contests anymore, of course — most agents frown upon their clients’ entering them, and really, pros skew the scoring curve. But when my clients ask me whether a particular contest is worthwhile for them to enter, my yardstick is this: if they can pull together a contest entry with already-written material within a day’s worth of uninterrupted writing time, I consider it reasonable.

I like this standard, because the more time you have to write, the more entry-ambitious it encourages you to be.

So if a contest requires time-consuming funky formatting, or printing on special contest forms, or wacko binding, you might not want to bother. To my contest-experienced eyes, such requests are not for your benefit, but the contest organizers’.

How so? Because — and hold onto your hats, everybody, because I am about to reveal a deep, dark secret of the contest trade here — the primary purpose of these elaborate requests for packaging is to make it as easy as possible to knock entries out of finalist consideration.

As a matter of simple probability, the more that contest rules ask entrants to do to package an entry, the more ways an entrant can get it wrong. By setting up stringent and easily-visible cosmetic requirements, the organizers maximize the number of entries they can simply toss aside, unread.

Yes, you read that right: it’s so they don’t have to read all of the entries in full.

Interestingly enough, many of the organizers of contests that establish these demands are quite open about their being merely an exercise in rule-following — and that they do it in order to preserve that most precious of commodities in this industry, time.

Not that you’d have to be Einstein, Mme. de Staël, and Confucius rolled into one to figure it out. Think about it: if contest organizers really only were only seeking uniformity amongst the entries, they could easily just say, “We will only accept entries in standard manuscript format.”

No fuss, no bother, and besides, all of their entrants who want to get published should be using standard format, anyway, right? Manuscripts not conforming to standard manuscript format tend, after all, to be rejected unread in both contest situations and in agents’ offices. (If you are not already aware of the requirements of standard format for manuscript, do yourself a favor and check out the STANDARD FORMAT BASICS category at right.)

Instead, the organizers in this type of contest can merely assign some luckless intern or volunteer to go through the entries before the judges see page 1 of them, plucking out any that are in the wrong type of folder, printed on the wrong type of paper, don’t have the right funky margins…well, you get the idea.

Voilà! The number of entries the judges have to read has magically decreased! Shades of Millicent, eh?

I find this practice annoying, frankly, and the surprisingly common corollary of not being crystal-clear about the costs to the entrant of deviations from these non-literary requirements close to despicable. Over-adherence to nit-picky presentation issues provides the organization with the illusion of selectivity on bases that have nothing to do with the quality of the writing.

And that, my friends, is unfair to writers everywhere.

Which brings me to a specialized question aimed at those of you who are currently embroiled in preparing contest entries: how much of your writing time is being eaten up by contests these days? If you have been entering quite a few (and we’ve just finished a season of deadlines for contests and fellowship applications, and are about to enter another), would your time be better spent by passing on the next one?

As I intimated earlier in this series, there are so many literary contests out there that if you entered them all, you would never have a chance to get down to serious writing. Equally seriously, if you have a finished piece that you should be marketing to agents and/or small presses, it is very easy to tell yourself that entering contest after contest — at the expense of devoting that time to sending out queries — is a time- saver, in the long run.

Unfortunately, that isn’t always true.

Yes, a win (or place, or finalist status) in a reputable contest can indeed speed up your agent-seeking process exponentially. It would be kind of pointless for me, of all people, to deny that, as I met my agent as a direct result of winning a contest. It CAN lead to the fast track, and you should definitely enter a few for that very reason.

Yet, contrary to many, many entrants’ expectations, it doesn’t ALWAYS lead to landing an agent, even if you win.

True, a contest credential almost always moves your submission up in the pile, and sometimes even allows it to jump the Millicent screening stage entirely, jumping directly to the agent’s desk. But a contest judge’s idea of what is marketable at the moment is often a bit outdated; an agent or editor might not agree. And most contests feature many categories that do not correspond to the interests of the agents and editors invited to the conference where the winners are announced.

Word to the wise: entering contests probably should not be your only agent-seeking strategy.

It’s an understandable choice, of course — sending out query after query is discouraging, and in the current ultra-competitive writers’ market, it can sometimes take years to pique a good agent’s interest.

Not that it will take my readers years, of course. You’re one market-savvy bunch.

However tired of the querying grind you may be, PLEASE do not fall into the trap of using contests as a complete substitute for querying. For one thing, the turn-around time for contest entries is significantly longer than the response time for even the least organized agencies: four to six months is common, and if you have a finished novel or NF book proposal in hand, that’s FAR too long to wait for a single response.

Also, if you hang all of your hopes on a contest win, even if you enter a plethora of contests, you are relying upon the quirky tastes of people you have never met to determine your fate.

Do I sense some disagreement out there? “But Anne,” some disgruntled voices mutter, “isn’t that true when you send a query to an agent as well? You spent a significant part of your time here demonstrating the difference between the things a writer can control and those we can’t, and unless I’m very much mistaken, this is one of the latter.”

Well, sort of. Just as there are certain dependable agents’ pet peeves that seem to transcend space and time (hel-LO, topic for March!), there are a great many predictable reasons a submission might get knocked out of a contest competition; I shall be talking about those later this month. But in contests, there can also be considerations that have little to do with the actual marketability — and sometimes not even the writing quality — of your entry.

To be blunt about it, to make it to the finalist round in a contest, you have to avoid every conceivable pet peeve that the initial screeners might have. And, believe it or not, your garden-variety contest judge tends to have MORE pet peeves than Millicent the agency screener.

Mind-blowing, isn’t it? But true. With first readers at agencies (who are seldom the agents themselves, recall), you can at least rely upon certain basic rules. Standard format, for instance, is not a matter of individual whim, and while some rogue agents may prefer some slight variation upon it, you can bet your next-to-last nickel that if you follow it, you’re not going to have your submission tossed out on technical grounds if you follow it.

But in a contest, if you hit a volunteer first reader whose college English professor insisted that semicolons are ALWAYS an indicator of poor writing — yes, such curmudgeons do exist, and their erstwhile students abound — your work is likely to lose its shot at the finalist round the first time you use one.

Ditto with the passive voice, or multiple points of view. You never can tell who is going to be a contest judge, so the outcome even for very good writing is not always predictable.

So please, I beg of you, keep sending out those queries while you are entering contests — and if you find that the time to prep contest entries are starting to be your excuse for not sending out more queries, stop and reevaluate whether you are making the best use of your time in your pursuit of publication.

If for no other reason that that I would really, really like to be able to gloat when your first book comes out. I ask for so little; humor me.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Picking the right literary contest for you, part VI: got the time tick tick ticking in my head

Picking the right literary contest for you, part VI: got the time tick tick ticking in my head

time-running-out-jpeg.jpg

In case you’re joining us mid-series, for the past few posts, I’ve been discussing criteria a sensible writer might use in determining which contests make the most sense to enter and which to eschew. Today, I am going to talk about something rarely discussed, even amongst writers who routinely enter literary contests: the widely differing time commitments necessary to meet contest criteria.

That knowing chuckle you just heard echoing through the ether was the concurrence of every literary contest winner, placer, shower, and finalist who has every walked the planet.

How do I know that they’re the chucklers? Because — wait for it — the folks who put in the extra time tend to be the ones who place best.

But really, it’s hard to find a contest whose rules DON’T require the investment of quite a bit of time over and above the actual writing. In fact, it often comes as something of a shock to those new to entering contests just how time-consuming many of them are.

Do I hear some unrealized wails out there from those of you who are considering entering your first contest? “But Anne,” some of you protest, and who could blame you? “I don’t understand. I’m not planning to enter a contest that requires me to write fresh material for it — I’m entering my novel/memoir/poem that I finished writing a year ago. To enter it into a contest, I just need to print it out, fill out a form, write a check, and find a mailbox, right?”

Oh, my sweet, dear innocents. To put it as gently as possible: no.

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

How few, you ask? Well, off the top of my head, thinking back over the last dozen years or so, I would estimate that the grand total would be roughly…none.

At minimum, any blind-judged contest is going to require that you prepare a special rendition of your manuscript devoid of your usual slug line — because your slug line, of course, includes your name.

Translation: you can’t just photocopy or print your current MS and mail it to a contest. And anything beyond that is, alas, time-consuming.

I hate to tell those of you who write nonfiction this, but any blind-judged contest will require that you remove every reference to your name from the entry. In a novel, that may merely involve revising the slug line, but in a nonfiction piece about, say, your family, it may require coming up with fresh names for practically every character.

Yes, I’ve done it — my big contest win was, after all, for a memoir. And because I love you people, I’m not going to tell you just how long that took. I wouldn’t want to give you nightmares.

Why do I keep harping on the importance of valuing your time, in the face of a publishing industry which, to put it very gently indeed, doesn’t?

Precisely because the industry doesn’t. While dealing with agents who take three months to respond to queries, and editors who take a year to pass judgment on a submission, if you don’t treat your time as a precious commodity, it’s all too easy to conclude that the industry is right: writers’ time is as vast as the sea, and as easily replenished as a tidal pool adjacent to a beach.

I don’t think so.

I measure time by the standards of a professional writer: every waking minute spent away from my current writing project, or from editing my clients’ writing projects, is expensive. More expensive, I think, than the equivalent minutes in the average agent or editor’s quotidian lives, because they are not typically creating new beauty and truth in every spare nanosecond they can steal. What writers do is important, not only to the writers themselves, but to humanity.

So there.

I tend to doubt that what I’m going to say next will cause any of my long-term readers to fall over with surprise, but here is my credo, in case any of you missed it: since we writers control so little else along our paths to publication, I’m a great advocate of controlling what we can.

So let’s spend today’s post looking at how a contest-entering writer can make most efficient use of her time.

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

Parenthetically – because I am, as my long-time readers are already aware, constitutionally incapable of not following an interesting line of thought when it comes up — isn’t it amazing, given how much uncompensated time we all invest into our art, just how often time has been coming up in this blog as the single most common decision-making determinant? Such as:

* Your queries need to be pithy from the get-go because agency screeners only spend seconds upon each.

* You should send out simultaneous queries because your time is too valuable to expend the extra years single-shot querying can take.

* Agents don’t give rejection reasons because they don’t have the time to give substantive feedback to everyone. (I like to call this the Did You Bring Enough Gum for the Whole Class? defense.)

* Your submission (and contest entry) needs to elicit a “Wow!” for the writing and a “Whoa!” for the pacing on page 1 — or at the very latest, by page 5 — in order to cajole a professional reader into continue past the opening of the pages they requested you send.

* Although your story may legitimately take 600 pages to tell, agents and editors start to get nervous when a first novel rises above the 400-page mark — or 100,000 words, to use industry-speak. Even less, in some genres.

Need I go on?

Given that pattern, the advice I’m about to give next will probably come as a shock to no one: before you invest ANY time in prepping the entry, look very carefully at the requirements of any contest you are considering entering and ask yourself, “Is this honestly going to be worth my time?”

Pretty much every contest requires the entrant to fill out an entry form — which can range from requests for ultra-simple contact information to outright demands that you answer actual essay questions. (Applications for fellowships and residencies virtually always include essay questions, FYI.) And yes, Virginia, misreading or skipping even one of these questions on the entry form generally results in disqualification.

Or, at any rate, in an entry’s being tossed out of finalist consideration — which, from the entrant’s point of view at least, amounts to very much the same thing.

I wanted to state this explicitly, because last year, a number of entrants in feedback-giving contests sent me excerpts (or even, in a couple of cases, the entirety) of their judges’ critique, saying accusingly, “See? I didn’t follow your guidelines, and I wasn’t disqualified.”

Without exception, however, these independent-minded souls did not win, either.

Even if an entry does explicitly violate contest rules, it is highly unusual for the contest organizers to tell the entrant about it; most of the time, the entry is just quietly removed from next-round consideration. Which is unfortunate, in a way, because those entrants who violate the rules (often inadvertently) are thus prevented from learning from their mistakes.

But trust me, contest judges are REQUIRED not to give high marks to entries that violate the rules. Which means that if you don’t have the time to read, re-read, and read them again, modifying your pages accordingly, it’s probably not worth your time to enter the contest.

“But Anne,” I hear some of you cry, “you said only a few paragraphs ago that every contest will have some rules to follow. How can I tell if what any given contest is asking of me is de trop?

Good question, disembodied voices. One- or at most two-page application form is ample for a literary contest; a three- or four-page application is fair for a fellowship or residency.

Anything more than that, and you should start to wonder what they’re doing with all of this information.

A contest that gives out monetary awards will need your Social Security number eventually, for tax purposes (yes, contest winnings are taxable), for instance, but they really need this information only for the winners. I would balk about giving it up front.

I have also seen contest entry forms that ask writers to list character references, especially those contests aimed at writers still in school. It’s an odd request, isn’t it, given that the history of our art form is riddled with notorious rakes, ne’er-do-wells, and other social undesirables who happened to write like angels? Some awfully good poetry and prose has been written in jail cells over the centuries, after all.

Personally, I don’t believe that a contest should throw out the work of a William Makepeace Thackeray or an H.G. Wells because they kept mistresses…or to toss Oscar Wilde’s because he didn’t. Or, for that matter, close its entry rolls to a shy kid whose high school English teacher doesn’t happen to like her.

In practice, reference requests are seldom followed up upon, and even less frequently used to disqualify entries before they are read, but they are occasionally used as tie-breakers. A good literary contest is not going to refuse to read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s entry because of that bottle of laudanum he was fond of carrying in his pocket, or disqualify Emily Dickinson’s poetry submission because her neighbors noticed that she didn’t much like to go outside.

No, they’d wait until the finalist round to do that. (Just kidding. Probably.)

I have questioned contest organizers why they ask for references, and they claim they do it solely so they can rule out people whose wins might embarrass the organization giving the award — basically, so they do not wake up one day and read in the newspaper that they gave their highest accolade to Ted Bundy.

So they might well gently shove aside an entry whose return address was a state or federal prison, to minimize the possibility of handing their top honor to someone wearing manacles and accompanied by a guard.

Call me zany, but personally, I would prefer to see potential and former felons turn their entries to the gentle arts of the sonnet or the essay over other, less socially-useful pursuits like murdering people with axes, embezzlement, or arson of public buildings, but evidently, not every contest organizer agrees with me. Again, I’m not sure that they have an ethical right to limit literature this way, but as I believe I have made clear in the past, I do not run the universe.

The moral: if you don’t have friends as disreputable as you are to vouch for you in a reference-requiring contest, you need to get out more — or at least graduate from high school. Join a writers’ group; we write tremendous references for one another.

I must admit, though, that my suspicious nature rears its paranoid head whenever I see requests for references; back in my contest-entry days, I tended to avoid these contests. If an entrant lists one of the contest judges as a reference, is the entry handled differently? If I can list a famous name as a reference, are my chances of winning better?

Only the conference organizers know for sure.

Contest entry forms frequently ask you to list your writing credentials, which I find bizarre in contests where the judging is supposed to be blind. Again, perhaps I am suspicious, but I always wonder if entries from authors with previous contest wins or publication credentials go into a different pile than the rest. They shouldn’t, if the judging is genuinely blind.

But to quote the late great Fats Waller, “One never knows, do one?”

I’m not saying that you should rule out contests that make such requests — but I do think that the more personal information the organization asks for, the more careful your background check on the contest should be.

When I see a request for references, for instance, I automatically look to see if the listed judges and/or their students have won previous competitions. A lot of the requesters are indeed on the up-and-up, but there is no surer waste of an honest writer’s time, talent, and resources than entering a rigged contest — or one with a demonstrable bias.

But do not despair, dear readers: there are plenty of literary contests — and fellowships, too — out there that are absolutely beyond reproach. By keeping your eye out for warning signs before you sink your valuable time into filling out extensive applications, you will be keeping your work — and your entry fees — out of the hands of the greedy.

And hey, any of you out there who may be considering committing a felony in the days to come: take my advice, and take up short story writing instead. I assure you, everyone will be happier in the long run.

There! That’s another day of crime prevented; my work here is done.

Before you realize that you’ve never seen me and Superman together, I’m signing off. Keep up the good work!

(PS: The image at the top of this post appears courtesy of the fine folks as FreeFoto.com.)

Posted on - No Comments on Picking the right literary contest for you, part V: just walk on by

Picking the right literary contest for you, part V: just walk on by

For reasons best known to himself, my SO has taken to playing the music of Dionne Warwick, she of the Psychic Friends Network, repetitively in our shared abode this evening. It’s not that I have anything against Ms. Warwick’s oeuvre, but the music of Burt Bacharach has always made me just a trifle, well, sleepy. It’s a tad hypnotic.

Which is perhaps why I suddenly feel compelled to share this with you:

the-way-to-san-jose-jpeg.jpg
The way to San Jose.

That established (phew!), let’s get back to the topic du semaine: maximizing your contest entry dollar. Ideally, I’d like to convince you to look upon each potential contest entry as not merely a fresh roll of the dice to try to win the jackpot of recognition (and, the common writerly fantasy goes, an agent and major book deal immediately thereafter), but as an exercise to learn how to improve your writing.

There are basketfuls of good reasons to enter contests in general — or, to be precise, to win them: the undoubted ECQLC (eye-catching query letter candy), the writing résumé boost, the opportunities to promote yourself to conference-attending agents, to name but a few.

As I’ve been pointing out for the last few days, however, not all contests are created equal. Entering some will help you more than entering others, so it is very much to your advantage to choose your contests wisely.

This is particularly true for novelists and nonfiction writers who enter contests; poets, essayists, and short story writers have exponentially more contest venues, and entry fees tend to be correspondingly lower.

Proof: if you write in any of these shorter formats, you have only to open any issue of Poets & Writers to find dozens of contests just crying out for your work — contests that often include publication as part of the prize. So just a couple of wins in these categories, even in tiny contests, can add up to a serious upgrade in query letter decoration.

On the down side, the greater scope of opportunity renders these contest wins less valuable in the eyes of agents and editors than winning for a longer piece. In general, in fact, the adulation tends to be substantially greater for winners of categories rewarding entire books.

Which is kind of ironic, as there are comparatively few contests devoted to unpublished book-length manuscripts — and with very few exceptions, the ones that exist ask entrants to submit only a tiny fraction of the book being judged.

On average, 15-25 pages, inclusive of synopsis. And contest judges tend not to reward entries with super-short synopses, either.

A cynic might conclude from this that what these contests are actually rewarding is the ability to write a stellar first chapter and synopsis, rather than the talent to maintain interest in a story or argument for an entire book.

A purist might huff that while there are plenty of people who can write a pretty opening, these contests owe it to the literary world to guard readers from mid-book slump.

A pragmatist, on the other hand, would just look at this phenomenon and say, “Where on earth would they find volunteers to read 700 book-length entries?”

The fact is, the vast majority of contests ask for short pieces, for the simple reason that it requires much, much less effort on the sponsoring organization’s part to process them. The result, as those of you who have gone contest-searching have probably already noticed, is that book-length writers have many fewer contest fora at their disposal.

Causing novelists the world over to cry: what’s it all about, Alfie?

Don’t feel too sorry for them, poets, essayists, and short story writers — writers of book-length pieces enjoy the considerable comparative advantage of being paid astronomically more for their work than writers of shorter pieces. You’d have to place a tremendous number of poems in paying venues to make ends meet without a day job, after all.

If you want to pity them, base it on the fact that the contest universe is hugely biased toward producers of shorter pieces, making it significantly harder for novelists and such to chalk up a contest win at all.

If you write in the longer formats, yet are comfortable in the shorter, you might want to consider polishing a single short story, poem, or essay to a high luster and sending it on the contest circuit, to try to rake in a win you can add to your credentials list. Trust me, in ten years, no one is going to hold it against you that the credential you used to catch an agent’s attention was for a gorgeously terse poem, while the book you were pitching at the time was a three-volume work of science fiction.

It may not make as stunning an ECQLC impression as a win for an entire book, but hey, those of us with small rubies look good in our jewelry, too.

There is an unfortunately pervasive rumor on the writers’ conference circuit that every agency screener in the land has been instructed to toss ANY book-pushing query letter that contains reference to poetry — however slight, and even if it refers to a major contest win — directly into the trash.

This is not true, and as nearly as I can tell, has never been widely true: it’s an exaggerated way of saying that poetry contest wins are not an automatic entrée into the publishing world. Which makes some sense, actually: being able to write a good poem does not necessarily translate into being able to write a good book.

Personally, I feel that the short story and the novel are also quite different art forms, as different as painting in oils and sketching in charcoal. Witness the number of writers who publish several short stories in venues like THE NEW YORKER, and publish them in collections, only to find after they have signed a novel contract that they don’t have a novel in them.

Why? Well, often, good short pieces are about the surprise of instant revelation; novels (and book-length memoirs, and nonfiction books) are about character and argument development.

I know a lot of writers disagree with me on this subject, though — including, I should mention, virtually everyone who has ever taught or been a student in an M.F.A. program — so you should feel free to ignore my opinion entirely on this point. Try your hand in more than one format, if you like so you may enter lots of different contests.

However, if shorter work is not your forté, it probably is not worth the expenditure of energy and angst to stop writing on your longer work in order to pull something short together for a contest.

But no matter where you fall on the length spectrum, adhere to the following little axiom with the tenacity of a starving leech: make sure that every page you enter in a contest represents your best writing.

Not just writing that’s pretty good, or prose that you think might catch an agent’s eye. Or the first 20 pages of a novel that starts to sing by page 62.

If the writing you’re planning to submit doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, cover you in goosebumps, and make you murmur fervent gratitude to the deity of your choice that you were privileged to write it, it does not belong in an entry.

Seriously — you’d be amazed at how many entries judges see that consist of perfectly adequate prose, but not writing that jumps off the page. If there isn’t an arresting image, great twist, or lovely sentence on page 1, even for a book-length entry, it’s probably not going to end up in the finalist pile.

I was going to insert a joke here about looking at your potential entry and crying, I know I’ll never love this way again, but really, do you need that kind of reference rattling around in your brainpan?

There’s another criterion you might want to consider in deciding whether it’s in your best interest to enter a particular piece of writing in a contest: how closely does it conform to the demands of the current literary market?

Artistically, that may seem like a secondary consideration, but in practice — and I’m letting you in on a literary judge secret here, because that’s what friends are for — most of the time, at least initially, contest judges are not so much judging the quality of the writing in an entry as assessing its marketability.

And THEN they worry about the writing.

Yes, you read that correctly. A great idea with huge market potential, presented in a clear and professional manner, will often edge out a beautifully-written piece aimed at a tiny market niche.

I know; I was disappointed when I first learned that, too. Wow, I thought, I’ll never fall in love again.

Naturally, marketability is not the primary orientation of every contest that accepts book-length work (or portions thereof), but it weighs heavily in the scoring more often than not. There’s a pretty good reason for that, too: it’s not unusual for the final judges of a contest to be the exact same agents and editors who appear at the attached conference.

And if there is anything that THEY’re looking for, it’s marketability. Great writing is always a plus, but to win a contest, it isn’t always enough.

Knowing this BEFORE you enter a contest can save you a LOT of grief — and a lot of wasted entry fees. If your work is not particularly mainstream, select contests that cater to your niche, rather than hoping your work will fly in a more general category.

Alternatively, if your work is an absolute dead-on fit for its genre, you might not want to waste your time, energy, and resources on a contest that has traditionally rewarded very literary writing.

If you are unsure where your work falls on the spectrum, select a contest where the judges give written feedback on entries — it’s some of the least sentimental, least punch-pulling marketing advice you will ever receive. Believe me, if you’ve mislabeled your work, they’re going to let you know about it.

If you approach a feedback-generating contest in that spirit, you can learn a great deal — especially if you are new to querying and aren’t sure why your work keeps getting rejected.

Which brings me, at long last (phew again!), to the final question to ask yourself before entering a contest: does it offer advantages for non-winning entrants?

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but almost no one wins the first contest she enters.

Why? Well, most contest entrants experience a fairly sharp learning curve, for reasons I shall be covering later in this series; there are many, many simple mistakes that can, if not actually disqualify inexperienced entrants outright, at least minimize the probability of their making the finals.

Yes, even in otherwise well-written entries. And that’s over and above problems any given entry might encounter by not being written in the contest’s preferred style.

“Huh?” I hear those new to the game cry.

Even if your entry is a monument of precision and contest-rule adhesion, you may have to enter a few times to learn the rhythms and preferences of a particular contest before you win. I wish this weren’t the case; life would be easier for virtually every contest entrant on the planet if stylistic preferences were simply expressed openly, rather than the usual contest rhetoric about rewarding the best new writing out there.

Best is subjective, after all.

Yet it’s rare to the point of jaw-dropping for a contest to state up front in its rules, look, you may be a brilliant writer destined to wow millions, but if you don’t use adverbs exactly the way Annie Proulx does, don’t bother entering. Or we’re POV Nazis; sending us anything with multiple perspectives will only end in tears. Or even in case you haven’t noticed, we have never given a major award to a writer who wasn’t already a member of our organization. Other people’s entry fees may be regarded as a donation to our group; thanks very much.

I say a little prayer for you nightly, in the hope that this will change.

For these reasons, it is very much in your interest to make your first contest entries ones that will help teach you something even if you don’t land in the winners’ circle.

For instance, if you are new to the game, it is a better use of your contest-entering buck to go for contests that recognize semi-finalists, as well as finalists. That way, you maximize your probability of garnering ECQLC boasting rights from those entries.

Contests that offer significant feedback to contest entrants are very, very useful when you are first starting out, too, as you may use them to learn how to polish up future entries. In contests for novel-length work that don’t provide feedback, an entrant would need to engage in serious bribery to obtain that type of information.

To sum up: there is a whole range of benefits that can accrue from contest entry beyond winning the grand prize. By selecting the contests that meet your current needs, rather than entering blindly or with an all-or-nothing attitude, you can greatly increase the probability that entering will do you good.

And, of course, you might win! But will you still love me tomorrow?

Keep up the good work!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No exceptions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there’s the money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other than boasting rights in query letters, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now where was I? Ah, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the same volunteers, year after year after year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The moral: let the entrant beware.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a win/win, in other words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep up the good work!

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Posted on - No Comments on Spreading the joy — and a bit more advice about engaging professional readers

Spreading the joy — and a bit more advice about engaging professional readers

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Before I launch into today’s topic, I have some wonderful news to report: long-time blog reader Thomas DeWolf has a memoir coming out from Beacon Press in January! Congratulations, Tom!

This is one of those “See, it CAN be done!” stories I love to pass along: Tom, you see, is one of those good writers with a good story who took the time to learn how the business works. As a reader of my blog on the PNWA site (don’t worry; the archives are all here, so you’re not missing anything), he e-mailed me a set of insightful questions, then sought out the late lamented Pitch Practicing Palace to refine his pitch.

That was two years ago, and I STILL remember the story: INHERITING THE TRADE is about Tom’s discovery (at the age of 47!) that he was descended from the most successful slave-trading family in U.S. history, responsible for importing over 10,000 Africans to the Americas. Horrified yet intrigued, Tom retraced his ancestors’ business dealings from New England to West Africa to Cuba, trying both to learn the truth and come to terms with what his family had done.

Not the kind of story one forgets, eh?

Everybody, please join me in a warm round of applause for Tom. As his publication date approaches, I shall keep you posted on his book’s progress. And please, everyone, remember to drop me a line about your triumphs when the happy day comes, so we can all share in the joy.

Okay, back to business.

For the last couple of posts, I have been talking about yet another present the legendary Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver might want to consider for the aspiring writers on his list: a few hours’ worth (or a few hundred pages’ worth) of professional editing. But, as I argued yesterday, whatever you — or Santa — decide you want from a freelance editor, make sure you know PRECISELY what services you are buying. And before you (or the Furtive NDGG) invest what can be quite a bit of money in the editing process, it’s important to have a clear idea of what you want to get out of the experience as a writer.

Other than to be picked up by an agent and/or sell the book to a publisher after taking the freelancer’s advice, of course. Actually, since freelance editors stand outside the agency and publishing house, none of us can legitimately make promises that any specific advice we give will unquestionably result in landing an agent or eventual publication.

And if you encounter anyone who tells you otherwise, run, don’t walk, to the nearest exit. As on the Internet, if an offer sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Let the buyer beware.

So what can a legitimate freelance editor offer you? Well, among other things, perhaps answers about why a manuscript sporting a really good premise and good writing has been getting rejected. Remember, most manuscripts are rejected within the first page or two, for reasons that might not be apparent to the lay reader. A professional reader well versed in the writing norms of a particular book category or genre, however, can often give substantial insight into how to tweak a manuscript to avoid pitfalls.

Call me zany, but I suspect that there are many, many aspiring writers out there who would like to be told if there is a fixable problem behind all of those form-letter rejections that don’t specify what went wrong. (Are you listening, Furtive NDGG? You’ve already checked that list twice; leave it alone and pay attention.)

To bolster the egos I felt sagging during the last two paragraphs: not having some magical internal sensor that tells one just what the problem is most emphatically not a reflection upon one’s writing talent. Spotting it is usually a matter of experience, pure and simple.

As I mentioned yesterday, agents and editors don’t read like everyone else, and neither do good freelance editors. Our eyes are trained to jump on problems like… well, fill in any predator-prey analogy you like here. The point is, we’re fast, and our aim is deadly.

Since manuscripts are now expected to be completely publication-ready by the time they reach an agent’s desk — although they are frequently revised afterward — getting professional feedback can be exceptionally helpful. However — and this is a BIG however — writers new to having their work edited are often astounded, and even hurt, by just HOW straightforward professional feedback can be.

Think about that very, very carefully before you give this particular present, Furtive NDGG.

Now that I’ve put Santa on the qui vive, allow me to give the rest of you a heads-up: like an agent or editor at a publishing house, a good freelance editor is not going to pull any punches. The manner of conveying the information may be kind, but if any of them believe that a particular writing issue is going to harm your book’s market prospects, they are going to tell you so point-blank.

That is, after all, what they are being paid to do. That may seem self-evident, but in practice, it often isn’t.

That’s understandable, right? Serious manuscript feedback generally isn’t fun even when it’s free. While the brain may understand that critique is a good idea, the emotions often hold the opposite opinion. Someone who approaches the process primarily seeking ego reassurance from someone in the biz that his work is fine as it stands is almost invariably going to be disappointed.

And let’s face it, most of us write in the hope and expectation that someone will pay US to read our work, not that we will need to pay someone to read it. It can make one a mite testy.

The result: pretty much every editor you will find will have at least one story about the writer who showed up insisting that he wanted no-holds-barred, professional-level feedback — and then freaked out the instant he got it, because he hadn’t expected to be told to change his manuscript.

It sounds funny, but actually, it’s a not-uncommon result of a writer’s going into the editorial process — or into dealing with an agent or publishing house; the essential pattern’s the same — not understanding how the industry views criticism, as an impersonal means of improving the marketability of a manuscript.

I am reminded of M.F.K. Fisher’s story about being solicited to write a preface for a charity cookbook — you know, one of those collections of recipes that were so popular as fundraisers in the 1970s. The cookbook’s editors, both volunteers, came to visit Fisher, a neighbor of theirs, in the hope that having a big-name food writer attached to their compilation of local recipes would make the book sell better. It was, they told her, for a good cause, so she donated her expertise.

Well (the story goes), Fisher took the draft book from them and had a good, professional look through it. Without missing a beat, she instantly began barking out everything that was wrong with the book: poor editing, meandering writing, abundant redundancies, all of the things that professional writers and editors automatically flag in a manuscript.

When she looked up, however, the amateur editors were not gratefully taking notes. Instead, they were dissolved in tears. From their non-professional standpoint, Fisher had been hugely, gratuitously, deliberately mean, whereas in fact she had been paying them the compliment of taking their project {seriously}.

Yes, yes, I know: by this logic, the person eaten by a lion should be flattered by the lion’s impression that he tastes good. But as I have mentioned before, I don’t make the rules; I just tell you about ’em.

The fact is, from a professional perspective, whitewashing an editorial opinion about a manuscript is a waste of everyone’s time. In a freelance editor’s feedback, it would border on unethical.

For those of you who think that this mindset sounds like a pretty fine reason to steer clear of anyone who might be tempted or empowered to pay this particular stripe of compliment, let me hasten to add: the ability to take criticism well is a highly valuable professional skill for writers; you need to develop it as part of your tool kit.

Your dream agent, I assure you, will just assume that you have already have it up your sleeve.

This is precisely why your dream agent probably should not be the first human being to set eyes on your work. If you do not have experience rolling with harsh-but-true feedback, it is well worth your while to join a very critical writing group, or take a writing class from a real dragon, or (why didn’t I think of this before?) show some of your work to a freelance editor, before you send your work to an agent.

Trust me, it is much, much easier to accept suggestions on how to revise your work gracefully when your critiquer is NOT the person who is going to decide whether to take you on as a client or acquire your book. The stakes are lower, so it’s less stressful by far. The experience alone is a pretty good reason to run at least part of your manuscript (say, the first 50 pages) across a freelance editor’s desk.

Which brings me to my final piece of advice on the subject: if you are brand-new to textual feedback, or if the potential cost of having all 542 pages of your baby edited makes your head spin, there’s no earthly reason that you need to jump into professional-level feedback with both feet right off the bat. (I’m sure I could have mixed a few more metaphors there, but you catch my drift, I’m sure.) Consider starting with just the first chapter, or the first few chapters, and working up from there.

This may sound as though I’m advising you to feed yourself to a school of piranha one toe at a time, but hear me out. One of the toughest lessons that every successful writer has to learn is that, regardless of how much we may wish it otherwise, agents don’t pick up books simply because someone wrote them. Nor do publishing houses offer contracts to books primarily because their authors really, really feel strongly about them.

Of course, these are the first steps to becoming a professional author, but they are not the only ones. The pros learn not only to write, but to rewrite — and yes, to take some pretty stark criticism in stride in the process. Not because having one’s words dissected is fun on a personal level, but because that is what the business side of this business expects from the creative side.

Your book is worth learning to live with that, isn’t it? Keep up the good work.

Posted on - 7 Comments on What to give a writer for Christmas, Part V: before you shell out the dosh

What to give a writer for Christmas, Part V: before you shell out the dosh

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The water is pretty nicely contained now (as here, in a container in my back yard — and yes, I’ll get off the photography kick soon) up Seattle way. I’m told, though, that the area around Chehalis is still pretty frightening, and that if you want to drive from here to Portland, you sort of have to drive a couple of hundred miles out of your way onto the other side of a mountain range to do it. Not pretty.

Speaking of the other side of the Cascades: don’t forget, Spokane-area writers, that I will be giving a talk on how to avoid common rejection triggers TOMORROW (Thursday, December 6th) at the Old Country Buffet, 5504 N. Division, at 11 AM. A good time should be had by all, and I have it on good authority that there will be informative handouts. For particulars, please visit the Spokane Authors & Self-Publishers’ website.

Last time, I suggested to Santa — and anyone else who might be listening — that some freelance editing might make an unusual-but-useful gift for the writer in one’s life. (To forestall suspicions of self-interest here: my client list is closed until I can make it through a full working day without a nap. The book doctor is, therefore, out.)

But not just any editorial service from any editor will do: pick one with a background in your type of book.

Why? Well, since writing norms vary quite a bit amongst book categories, good developmental editors usually specialize in certain types of books, far more than line editors or proofreaders do. But the fact is, even if they do not advertise themselves that way, almost anyone with experience will have developed a preference over time.

As I mentioned yesterday, while any good editor can make a manuscript conform to the overarching rules of English grammar, substantive or developmental editing — or even heavy copyediting — writing advice from someone with a truly firm grounding in the SPECIFIC expectations for YOUR type of book is going to be of more practical use to you.

So it’s a good idea to check in advance whether the freelancer you’re considering has experience with your type of manuscript, regardless of the level of editing needed. Or, for that matter, any philosophies of editing or reading habits that may conflict with your notion of what the book should be.

And that, my friends, is going to entail asking a few pointed questions.

A word to the wise: determining this is going to require some conversation with potential freelancers, either via phone or via e-mail, and I assure you, you will be much, much, MUCH happier during that conversation if you have already given some serious thought to what you want to get out of the editor-author relationship. I went over the different levels of editing yesterday; for further pondering direction, my editors’ guild has an excellent page of tips on how to find the right editor for you.

While most freelancers will be thrilled with the novelty of a client whose opening line is more complex than, “Um, I need an editor; what do you charge?” the conversation will go more smoothly if you (or Santa, if this is a gift, although I recommend leaving the final choice of editor up to the writer) have a few specific pieces of information already at your fingertips. Heck, you might even want to include them in the initial e-mail:

– The book’s category

– How many pages it is in standard format. (In case anyone’s forgotten, that’s double-spaced, single-sided pages in 12-point font with 1-inch margins AND two spaces after each period. PS: with pretty much any level of editing, your adhering closely to the rules of standard format in the manuscript will make it less time-consuming — and thus less expensive, typically — to edit.)

– How much of it you would like to be edited now (it’s not a bad idea to start with only the first few chapters, to get a feel for the experience)

– When you would like the editing to be completed

– Whether there is currently a deadline hanging over it (of which, more below)

– Whether you prefer feedback on hard copy (usually a little cheaper) or on a computer document

– What kind of word processing program you use (that can be important for attachments)

– The book’s submission history (has it been seen by many agents? Publishing houses? A particularly vicious writers’ group? No one but your dear old white-headed mother?)

Having this information up front will assist the editor in answering your questions and give you a common language to discuss the project in question. (Not to mention making the freelancer think spontaneously, “Oh, thank goodness: this one isn’t vague. What a welcome change!” )

During your preliminary interactions, you’re going to want to elicit enough information to make substantive (and not merely cost-based) distinctions between the editors you’re interviewing, so get specific with the questions. Does the freelancer have a genre specialty, for instance? What does she read for fun? Does she write in the margins, or prefer giving feedback electronically, in the text itself? Does she provide a write-up about the book instead or in addition to marginalia? Does she charge extra for follow-up questions? (Most pros do.)

Rest assured, none of this is pushy; it’s is perfectly acceptable to ask a potential editor about her background and methodology. If she’s brand-new to editing, these questions may surprise her, but most of this information is standard first-meeting stuff.

Ask, too, about her availability and average turn-around time. Don’t be surprised if she’s booked a few months in advance; although there are sometimes last-minute cancellations, the more experience an editor has, generally speaking, the less likely a brand-new client is to be able to book her time within the next month.

So if you know you have a deadline coming up — say, if a contest entry is due by a certain date — you’ll have better luck if you start editor-shopping early.

If you do find yourself in the market for last-minute feedback (say, to get requested materials out the door by a certain date), please bear in mind that unscheduled projects with ultra-quick turnarounds often require editors to inconvenience other clients and/or work double shifts.

For this reason, most freelancers charge extra for rush jobs — a 25% price bump is pretty standard — so it is worth your while to plan in advance. It’s also not unusual to ask for an advance deposit to book an editor’s time; you will want to find out up front whether there will be any additional charge if you need to push back your scheduled manuscript delivery date.

Don’t be surprised if the editor who sounds like a great fit suddenly turns a bit cagey on the subject of references. It may not be by choice: it’s not uncommon for published authors to be rather secretive about using the services of a freelance editor. (My work is hardly sub rosa, given how much I write about it here, but some of my clients’ agents would be fairly astonished to learn of my existence, I gather.)

Instead, consider asking if she would edit 5 or 10 pages as a work sample before you commit to a longer project. Most freelancers will do this happily, with sufficient advance notice, but do expect to pay for their time. (For a glimpse at average rates nationally, click here.)

This will give you considerably more information about how the editor works — and, after all, fit between editor and client is EXTREMELY important. An editor — freelance or otherwise — not familiar with the norms of your book category can actually harm your end product, and since everyone gives feedback slightly differently, it will save you both time and money in the long run if you do some comparison shopping to find someone who can give you professional-level feedback in the manner that will be easiest for you to incorporate it into your book.

It’s also a rather straightforward way for the shy to gain a sense of precisely how any given editor likes to approach a manuscript, what services he provides, and how much each part of it will cost. It’s worth your time to make some rate comparisons, if only to find what the local prevailing rates are.

Do be prepared, though, to pay the local market rates for what you expect to get, not only because it is fair, but also because many experienced freelancers will walk away from a negotiation if they feel that a potential client is trying to haggle down to the very last second.

If you encounter a freelancer who seems to be charging too little, you might want to be wary. An inexperienced editor might well not be aware yet how long giving feedback can take, and thus under-price himself — but a low price may also be an indication of an experienced editor who habitually gives minimal feedback, relying on volume to make a living. At both ends of the spectrum, then, it makes a great deal of sense to ask for a very specific indication of what to expect from the feedback.

If you’re genuinely not sure what the kind of editing you would like to receive should cost, consider posting your project on a freelance editors’ association’s job board and asking for bids. (The Northwest Independent Editors’ Guild has a dandy job board, very easy to use.) Be sure to include the full list of preliminary information above (okay, you can save the bit about how much you’ve shopped the book around until a later communication), and don’t be afraid to ask follow-up questions of those who respond.

As you may see, my friends, finding the right editor for you may take a bit of searching, but the right fit is worth it. And finding that entails compare-and-contrast exercise that entails far more than just checking who charges what, or even what credentials various candidates have. It involves taking the time to find an editor who loves your kind of book and who has the skills to make your manuscript the best it can possibly be.

When it comes right down to it, your work is too important to go into ANY critique relationship blindly. Just as you don’t want any random agent to represent you, regardless of track record, you honestly don’t want just ANY freelance editor to advise you about your book. Or just any writers’ group, for that matter.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk a bit about why enlisting a pro’s help might be a good idea, along with some indication of what you should and shouldn’t expect. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on What to give a writer for Christmas, Part IV: the e-word

What to give a writer for Christmas, Part IV: the e-word

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As you may see, the waters are at last receding — due, in large part, to the crew of drainage specialists who have been crawling all over our yard like ants all day, bless their busy hands. A writer lives in our basement mother-in-law apartment, you see, and thanks to yesterday’s bailing and today’s rerouting, she can once again wiggle her toes in relative dryness. Hooray!

Speaking of someone’s computer potentially being submerged without warning: when’s the last time you made a back up of your writing files? Is your most recent back-up someplace both accessible to you and moisture-safe?

I’m just asking.

I was going to end my sneakily double-edged series on gifts to give writers (and gifts writers can give themselves that might help them, you know, WRITE) on yesterday’s high-minded lecture about the value of time. However, it occurred to me in the dead of night that my season-long illness (and possible second season of further convalescence) is going to prevent my picking up any new clients for a while, I can talk about a really, really nice present that writers might like without running into potential conflict of interest.

So if you’re paying attention, Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver (a.k.a. Santa), I’m going to talk about how to go about purchasing some freelance editing.

Actually, I had been thinking about writing on this topic for some time, ever since clever and humorous reader Gordon pointed out that I had not, contrary to expectation, ever gone over how one might go about seeking professional editing services. (I’d been laboring under the delusion that I had written about it fairly explicitly at least once, but apparently, all I did was refer folks to the Northwest Independent Editors’ Guild.) Thanks for flagging me down, Gordon, because to the uninitiated, finding the right freelance editor for your work can be a tad on the difficult side.

Did I just hear some of you long-time readers out there groaning? Yes, you’re quite right: I AM about to say that just as not every agent is the best fit for any given book, neither is every editor. Nor, more to the point, is every freelance editor.

Note the distinction: an editor and a freelance editor are not the same thing.

An editor, generally speaking, works for a publishing house and is, often, the person responsible for acquiring books for the house to publish. While this role usually entails making requests for changes in the manuscript, they are not necessarily line edits: at a large publisher, correcting the grammar and flagging problems with flow is the province of the copyeditor. The editor tends to concentrate on big picture issues and shepherding the book through the sometimes quite bumpy road to publication.

Hey, somebody’s got to make the marketing and the production departments communicate, right?

A freelance editor, on the other hand, works for the author, helping get the book ready for submission. (Or, less frequently, assisting the author in implementing the editor’s sweeping requests by a specified deadline.) We do not acquire books — so those of you out there who persist in sending me pitches for books in the hope I will publish them, cut it out, please — nor do we, unless specifically requested, edit toward a particular publisher’s likes and dislikes. A good freelancer who specializes in your book category can, however, show you how to make a manuscript appeal to what’s selling in that market now.

Think of a freelance editor as a consultant who can give tips on whipping a book into market shape. Or, at the more intense levels of the biz, as a diagnostician who can figure out why a particular manuscript has been getting rejected.

If you were starting to have ideas in that direction, Furtive NDGG, few freelance editors issue formal gift certificates — although it’s an interesting idea. However, I think it’s safe to say that I don’t know a single one who would turn down an editing job just because someone other than the author proposes to pay for it.

Be warned, however: what such services cost can vary quite a bit, depending upon what a particular manuscript needs. Straightforward proofreading tends to be quite inexpensive, because it’s relatively speedy for an experienced editor to do; expect to pay in the neighborhood of $2-$3/page.

Line editing (also known as copyediting) is all about clarity and presentation, and is thus a great choice for a writer unfamiliar with the norms of submission or in question about grammar. Line editing involves both proofreading AND giving advice on how to rearrange sentences and paragraphs to maximize readability, so it takes far more time to do.

And that, believe it or not, is the good news. The less-good news is that how much line editing any given manuscript needs varies almost infinitely, so even the best freelance editor may need to give the book a once-over before even being able to give you an estimate. However, to keep your from wandering around in the dark unassisted, the Editorial Freelancers Association has a nifty chart that will give you some indication of hourly rates for different services.

The stated rates aren’t binding, mind you, but it will at least give Santa some indication of what he’s committing himself to shell out.

Developmental editing is the top of the product line, as it were, beginning at around $35/hour and climbing to much more, depending upon the editor’s experience, client list, and willingness to drop everything to counsel writers through midnight crises of faith. Typically, it encompasses both proofing and line editing, but also entails working with the author to correct overarching writing problems and refining the book on every level to tailor it to its intended target market.

And that, you guessed it, can take quite a bit of time, depending on how market-ready the manuscript already is. A good developmental editor will flag anything and everything in a manuscript that might conceivably make an agent or editor familiar with the book category hesitate for even a moment over the page. With that level of scrutiny, it’s not unusual to give feedback on practically every line of the book , so a developmental editor sometimes will spend hours on a single page.

Yes, you read that correctly. I wasn’t kidding about its being spendy.

Ideally, a developmental editor comes into the project near the beginning of the writing process, but in practice, the author often has a complete draft in hand. The more fundamental the changes you’re willing to make, generally speaking, the more you’ll like working with a developmental editor: it’s the closest a writer without a book contract in hand can come to the micro-level reading a manuscript will get before being picked up by a publisher.

Agents and editors don’t read like other people, you know: they read line by line, at least for the early parts of a submission, their little antennae alert for red flags. An experienced developmental editor can teach you how to keep those antennae happy.

Oh, then there’s substantive editing, which falls between line editing and developmental editing in both content and price. It, too, involves massaging a manuscript until the potential problems fall out. However, while a developmental editor will typically make all kinds of suggestions about different directions in which a particular scene could be taken, a strictly substantive editor will only work with what is already there.

To put it another way, a substantive editor comments on what is; a developmental editor works to make a book what it could be.

The line between the two sounds kind of slippery in theory, doesn’t it? I assure you, that’s only because it’s nebulous in practice. Many editor-seeking writers who begin looking for a substantive edit end up wanting — or needing — developmental services, so substantive is not a category every freelance editor recognizes.

Confused? I’d be surprised if you weren’t. Happily, my editors’ guild has been kind enough to post a blow-by-blow of the differences between the levels of editing for your dining, dancing, and comparison-shopping pleasure.

Given the broad range of services (and pricetags) available, it would behoove a writer thinking about hiring a freelance editor (or a Furtive NDGG thinking about doing so for someone else) to give some serious thought to the level and specificity of feedback a manuscript really needs. If you just want to know that your book is free of grammatical and spelling problems, it doesn’t make sense to shell out for developmental editing, after all.

Do I see some raised hands out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you cry, “I’ve never gotten professional feedback before. How can I tell what level of editing my book needs?”

Good question, disembodied voices, but shouldn’t you be off caroling somewhere? Isn’t it getting to be eggnog time in your part of the world?

In short, I’ll tackle the thorny issue tomorrow. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Quotable courage — and yet another reason to read (as if you needed one more)

Quotable courage — and yet another reason to read (as if you needed one more)

I’ve been beating the drum of risk-taking so hard for the last week that I needed a day to stop and change gears. Most of the work of writing, after all, occurs long before the submission stage, alone in the dark of night. Or light of day, depending upon your schedule.

So I was very pleased to stumble across a delightfully apt quote for aspiring writers this morning, courtesy of Anaïs Nin’s DIARY (Vol. 3, 1939-1944): “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

While I don’t think that’s always true — one is not, after all, the absolute center of the universe — it’s certainly true of trying to break into the publishing world. Opportunities do in fact expand for those courageous to keep pitching and querying.

The converse is also true: opportunities contract for those not willing to put their writing out there. As I pointed out in my recent series on SIOA-avoidance, too many writers reject their own work (by not Sending It Out, Already, for those of you who took Thanksgiving week off) before a soul in the industry has an opportunity to take a look at it.

Creative minds are uniquely qualified, unfortunately, to talk their owners out of taking the big risk. The what if? muscles in writers’ brains tend to be rather sophisticated, after all.

And, as Ruth Gordon informed us in L’OFFICIEL, courage, “like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.” (Oh, like you don’t go scurrying to your quote book when you find a good new one to add, and then start leafing through what’s already there…)

Again, true of both querying and submission: plenty of writers never get past the first rejection letter; it crushes them, because they read it as an entire industry’s — nay, and entire world’s! — rejection of what they have to say.

If you have fallen into this category for even twenty consecutive minutes, ever — and who among us hasn’t? — let me ask you to take on faith, at least provisionally, something I have learned from long, long experience: the 4th rejection hurts less than the first, and the 147th less than the 146th.

Believe it or not, the vast majority of writers who have landed agents and publishing contracts have had their work rejected dozens upon dozens — if not hundreds upon hundreds — of times over their professional lifetimes. Including yours truly. But we kept ploughing ahead until the industry started to take us seriously.

As Louise Nevelson wrote in DAWNS + DUSKS, “I think all great innovations are built on rejections.”

I’m not going to lie to you — it takes courage, and plenty of it, to keep querying and submitting your work to total strangers. And while I’m on a truth-telling binge, allow me to add: I think that those of us who don’t have to query anymore (i.e., already agented writers) and those who never had to query in the first place (agents, editors, pretty much everyone on the business side of the publishing industry) have a nasty habit of pretending that querying is just like sending out any other business letter.

It isn’t, of course; it requires facing down the naysayers in your own head and risking the rejection of people you do not yet know. Yet have you noticed how often speakers at writers’ conferences and writers of articles on querying imply that it’s the easiest thing in the world?

“There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract,” Helen Keller wrote in LET US HAVE FAITH, “but not for the concrete.”

Having been on both sides of this particular aisle, I’m here to tell you: tackling the day-to-day necessities of maintaining an ongoing querying campaign is much, much, MUCH more difficult than standing up and gassing about querying techniques from behind a podium. So the next time you’re at a conference being lectured about it, remember to pat yourself on the back a little for being braver than the speaker, in all probability.

Speaking of which: Spokane-area writers, I am going to be in that toddling town next week, on December 6th, giving a talk on reasons that manuscripts tend to get rejected to the Spokane Authors and Self-Publishers. Come to listen, ask questions, or just to graze at what I hear is a pretty spectacular buffet.

It is SO easy to forget whilst hiking the querying-and-submission trail that it honestly does take more courage on the part of an agent to sign a previously unpublished writer than a published one, just as it requires more bravery for an editor to take a chance on a brand-new writer than upon the 17th work by an established name.

This is why, in case you were wondering, those of us who have been in the biz for a while cringe when we hear an aspiring writer say, “Well, my book is at least as good as the rest of the junk out there.” The standard against which a new writer’s work is held is not that of the current market, contrary to popular belief, but considerably above it.

Don’t believe me? Try this little experiment: read five books by first-time authors in your chosen book category that have come out within the last year — then go and take a gander at what the time-honored leaders of the genre have put out lately. Do they honestly seem to be edited, let alone written, to the same standard?

It’s a good idea in general to get into the habit of reading the work of new authors in your book category, anyway, to keep abreast of what is being bought and sold recently — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard agents and editors complain about aspiring writers’ not being familiar with the current market, as opposed to what was hot ten years ago.

Besides, if you want to live in a world where publishers are eager to buy books like yours, it only makes sense to convey that preference through buying them yourself, right?

And if neither is incentive enough to spur you to curl up this winter with the latest offerings in your chosen book category, here’s another: reading first-time authors is a great way to pick up agent leads. As I’m sure you’re already aware (because I’m fairly certain that I’ve mentioned it within the last few months), the vast majority of books sold to publishers each year in this country are written by the already-published.

Why? Well, they have track records. And think about it: how often do you — or did you, prior to adopting the practice of actively seeking out first-time authors I suggested above — buy books by first-time authors?

Okay, what about ones you don’t know personally, or who haven’t won major awards?

Readers tend to gravitate toward names they know — and bookstores often encourage the practice. Unless the writer is a celebrity in another medium or a politician, such books are substantially less likely to be placed in a prominent position in a chain bookstore. Certainly, they are less likely to be place face-out on the bookshelf (which increases that probability of being browsed considerably). Naturally, this results in sales statistics that show very plainly that established authors sell better than new ones.

So your chances of getting picked up are higher if you already know a particular agent has been successful selling a first-timer like yourself. You know, at any rate, that the agent has been exceptionally brave at least once.

And wouldn’t you know it, Helen Keller has ANOTHER pithy statement that’s appropriate here, and from the same book? “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.” Are you listening, agents?

Because the agent who compulsively sells first novels is something of a rarity, let me once again urge you to draw a firm distinction in your mind between agents whose listings in the standard agents’ guides SAY they are open to queries from previously unpublished writers, and those who have a successful TRACK RECORD of selling first books.

As Abigail Adams seems to have written to her troublemaking husband in 1774, “We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.” Amen, Abby!

To be fair, agents — the successful ones, anyway — only take on what they’re pretty sure they can sell. As anyone in the industry will tell you at great length after he’s had a few drinks (oh, like it’s accidental that writers’ conferences almost always take place in hotels with bars in them…As Agnes Repplier was prone to say, and even wrote in 1891’s POINTS OF VIEW, “If a man be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariable credit him with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand, lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness.”), a first book, unless it is written by a celebrity, is quite a bit harder for an agent to pitch to a publisher than a second or third. On average, less than 4% of the fiction published in any given year is by first-time authors.

Sorry to be the one to break it to you. But as George Sand apparently wrote to some friend of hers in 1863, “Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.’” Or, if you prefer Thomas Jefferson, “We must not be afraid to follow the truth, wherever it may lead.”

I’m sure I could find a dozen more quotes on the subject if I really took a spade to the Bartlett’s, but I’m sure you catch my drift.

Tomorrow, I shall be talking about ways to translate your reading habit into querying leads — because while life may shrink or expand in proportion to one’s courage, chance also favors the prepared mind. Or so said Louis Pasteur.

What, you thought the boiling milk thing just came to him one day while he was thinking of something else? Keep up the good work!