Posted on - No Comments on Surviving a conference with your sanity — and energy — in one piece, or, if a stone can smile, so can you

Surviving a conference with your sanity — and energy — in one piece, or, if a stone can smile, so can you

That’s an actual stone in my yard, by the way, one that apparently went out of its way to anthropomorphize for our viewing pleasure. If rocks can be that friendly, it gives me great hope for human beings.

Which is my subtle way of leading into asking: after these last few weeks of posts, are you starting to have dreams yet about pitching?

If they’re not nightmares, and you’re scheduled to pitch at a conference anytime soon, you’re either a paragon of mental health, a born salesperson — or I’ve underemphasized the potential pitfalls. For the purposes of the rest of this series, I’m going to assume that you either ARE waking up in the night screaming or that I haven’t yet explained this adequately.

Hey, it always helps to be prepared.

A technologically-savvy reader wrote in to ask if it was considered appropriate to take notes on a laptop or Blackberry during conference seminars. It’s still not very common — surprising, given how computer-bound most of us are these days — but yes, it is acceptable, under two conditions.

First, if you do not sit in a very prominent space in the audience — and not solely because of the tap-tap-tap sound you’ll be making. Believe it or not, it’s actually rather demoralizing for a lecturer to look out at a sea of heads that are all staring at their laps: are these people bored, the worried speaker wonders, or just taking notes very intensely?

Don’t believe me? The next time you attend a class of any sort, keep your eyes on the teacher’s face, rather than on your notes. I guarantee that within two minutes, the teacher will be addressing half of her comments directly to you; consistent, animated-faced attention is THAT unusual. The bigger the class, the more quickly s/he will focus upon you.

Back to the Blackberry issue. It’s also considered, well, considerate to ask the speaker before the class if it is all right to use any electronic device during the seminar, be it computer or recording device.

Why? Think about it: if your head happens to be apparently focused upon your screen, how is the speaker to know that you’re not just checking your e-mail?

Enough about the presenters’ problems; let’s move on to yours. Do be aware that attending a conference, particularly your first, can be a bit overwhelming. You’re going to want to pace yourself.

“But Anne!” I hear conference brochure-clutching writers out there crying, “The schedule is jam-packed with offerings! I don’t want to miss a thing!”

Yes, it’s tempting to take every single class and listen to every speaker, but frankly, you’re going to be a better pitcher if you allow yourself to take occasional breaks. Cut yourself some slack; don’t book yourself for the entire time.

And make a point of doing something other than lingering in the conference center. Go walk around the block. Sit in the sun. Grab a cup of coffee with that fabulous SF writer you just met. Hang out in the bar that’s never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference; that tends to be where the already-agented and already-published hang out, anyway.

This is NOT being lax about pursuing professional opportunities: it is smart strategy, to make sure you’re fresh for your pitches. If you can’t tear yourself away, take a few moments to close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, to reset your internal pace from PANIC! to I’m-Doing-Fine.

I know that I sound like an over-eager Lamaze coach on this point, but I can’t overemphasize the importance of reminding yourself to take deep breaths throughout the conference. A particularly good time for one is immediately after you sit down in front of an agent or editor.

Trust me: your brain could use the oxygen right around then, and it will help you calm down so you can make your most effective pitch.

And at the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, please remember: writing almost never sells on pitches alone. You are not going to really know what an agent thinks about your work until she has read some of it.

Your goal here is NOT to be discovered on the spot, but to get the industry pro in front of you to ask to read your writing. Period.

Yes, I know: I’ve said this before. And I’m going to keep saying it as long as there are aspiring writers out there who walk into pitch meetings expecting to hear the agent cry, “My God, that’s the best premise since OLIVER TWIST. Here’s a representation contract — and look, here’s my favorite editor now. Let’s see if he’s interested.”

Then, of course, the editor falls equally in love with it, offers an advance large enough to cover New Hampshire in $20 bills, and the book is out by Christmas. As an Oprah’s Book Club selection, of course.

Long-time readers, sing along with me now: this is not how the publishing industry works.

The point of pitching is to skip the querying stage and pass directly to the submission stage. So being asked to send pages is a terrific outcome for this situation, not a distant second place to an imaginary reality.

Admittedly, though, is SO easy to forget in the throes of a pitch meeting. Almost as easy as forgetting that a request to submit is not a promise to represent or publish.

To reiterate: whatever an agent or editor says to you in a conference situation is just a conversation at a conference, not the Sermon on the Mount or testimony in front of a Congressional committee. Everything is provisional until some paper has changed hands.

This is equally true, incidentally, whether your conference experience includes an agent who actually starts drooling visibly with greed while you were pitching or an editor in a terrible mood who raves for 15 minutes about how the public isn’t buying books anymore. Until you sign a mutually-binding contract, no promises — or condemnation, for that matter — should be inferred or believed absolutely.

Try to maintain perspective.

Admittedly, perspective is genuinely hard to achieve when a real, live agent says, “Sure, send me the first chapter,” especially if you’ve been shopping the book around for eons. But it IS vital to keep in the back of your mind that eliciting this statement is not the end of your job as a marketer, because regardless of how much any given agent or editor says she loves your pitch, she’s not going to make an actual decision until she’s read at least part of it.

So even if you are over the moon about positive response from the agent of your dreams, please, I beg you, DON’T STOP PITCHING IN THE HALLWAYS. Try to generate as many requests to see your work as you can.

I’m serious about this. No matter who says yes to you first, you will be much, much happier two months from now if you have a longer requested submissions list. Ultimately, going to a conference to pitch only twice, when there are 20 agents in the building, is just not efficient.

Also, it is VERY much in your interest to send out submissions to several agents at once, rather than one at a time. And no, there is absolutely nothing unethical about this, unless (a) one of the agencies has a policy precluding multiple submissions (rare) or (b) you promised one agent an exclusive. (I would EMPHATICALLY discourage you from granting (b), by the way — and if you don’t know why, please see the EXCLUSIVES TO AGENTS category at right before you even CONSIDER pitching at a conference.)

And don’t worry — I’ll be talking next week about how to cover your proverbial donkey whilst sending out multiple submissions. For now, all you really need to know is that the old saw about agents’ getting insulted if you don’t submit one at a time is absolutely untrue; unless an agent ASKS for an exclusive look at your work, it’s neither expected nor in your interest to act as if s/he has.

So there.

Back to why you should keep on pitching in those hallways: it tends to be a trifle easier to get to yes than in a formal pitch.

Counter-intuitive, isn’t it? Yet in many ways, casual pitches are easier, for one simple reason: time. In a hallway pitch, agents will often automatically tell you to submit the first chapter, in order to be able to keep on walking down the hall, finish loading salad onto their plates, or be able to move on to the next person in line after the agents’ forum.

If the agent handles your type of work, the premise is interesting, and you are polite, they will usually hand you their business cards and say, “Send me the first 50 pages.”

Okay, pop quiz to see who has been paying attention to this series so far: after the agent says this, do you:

(a) regard this as an invitation to talk about your work at greater length?

(b) say, “Gee, you’re a lot nicer than Agent X. He turned me down flat,” and go on to give details?

(c) launch into a ten-minute diatribe about the two years you’ve spent querying this particular project?

(d) thank her profusely and vanish in a puff of smoke?

If you said anything but (d), go back and reread the whole series again — and the entirety of the INDUSTRY ETIQUETTE category at right as well. You need to learn what’s considered polite in the industry, pronto.

In a face-to-face pitch in a formal meeting, agents tend to be more selective than in a hallway pitch. (I know; counterintuitive, isn’t it?) Again, the reason is time. In a ten-minute meeting, there is actual leisure to consider what you are saying, to weigh the book’s merits — in short, enough time to save themselves time down the line by rejecting your book now.

Why might this seem desirable to them? Well, think about it: if you send it to them at their request, someone in their office is ethically required to spend time reading it, right? By rejecting it on the pitch alone, they’ve just saved Millicent the screener 5 or 10 minutes.

Also, sitting down in front of an agent or editor, looking her in the eye, and beginning to talk about your book can be quite a bit more intimidating than giving a hallway pitch — it helps to be aware of that in advance, I find. In a perverse way, a formal pitch can be significantly harder to give successfully than a hallway one.

So get out there and pitch, pitch, pitch! Think of it this way: every time you buttonhole an agent and say those magic first hundred words is one less query letter you’re going to need to send out.

Still hanging in there? Still breathing at least once an hour? Good; I’ll move on.

As a veteran of many, many writers’ conferences all over the country, I can tell you from experience that they can be very, very tiring. Especially if it’s your first conference. Just sitting under fluorescent lights in an air-conditioned room for that many hours would tend to leech the life force out of you all by itself, but here, you will be surrounded by a whole lot of very stressed people while you are trying to learn as much as you possibly can.

As you may have noticed, most of my advice on how to cope with all of this ambient stress gracefully is pretty much what your mother probably said to you when you went to your first party: be polite; be nice to yourself and others; watch your caffeine and alcohol intake, and make sure to drink enough water throughout the day. Eat occasionally.

And you’re not wearing THAT, are you?

Oops, slipped too far into Mom mode. Actually, on the only occasion when my mother actually made that comment upon something I was wearing, she had made the frock in question; she hastened to alter it. For my senior prom: a backless little number in midnight-blue Chinese silk that she liked to call my “Carole Lombard dress,” for an occasion where practically every other girl was going to be wearing something demure and flouncy by Laura Ashley; not what anyone expected the valedictorian to wear. Even with the alterations, most of the male teachers followed me around all night long.

Oh, what a great dress that was. Oh, how inappropriate it would have been for a writers’ conference — or really, for any occasion that did not involve going out for a big night on the town in 1939. But then, so would those prissy Laura Ashley frocks.

Which brings me back to my point (thank goodness).

I wrote on what you should and shouldn’t wear to a conference at some length in an earlier post, but if you find yourself in perplexity when you are standing in front of your closet, remember this solid rule that will help you wherever you go within the publishing industry: unless you will be attending a black-tie affair, you are almost always safe with what would be appropriate to wear to your first big public reading of your work.

And don’t those of you who have been hanging around the industry for a while wish someone had shared THAT little tidbit with you sooner?

To repeat a bit more motherly advice: do remember to eat something within an hour or two of your pitch meeting. I know that you may feel too nervous to eat. but believe me, if you were going to pick an hour of your life for feeling light-headed, this is not a wise choice. If you are giving a hallway pitch, or standing waiting to go into a meeting, make sure not to lock your knees, so you do not faint. (I’ve seen it happen, believe it or not.)

And practice, practice, practice before you go into your meetings; this is the single best thing you can do in advance to preserve yourself from being overwhelmed. As I pointed out yesterday, you will also be surrounded by hundreds of other writers. Introduce yourself, and practice pitching to them.

Better still, find people who share your interests and get to know them. Share a cookie; talk about your work with someone who will understand. Because, really, is your life, is any writer’s life, already filled with too many people who get what we do? You will be an infinitely happier camper in the long run if you have friends who can understand your successes and sympathize with your setbacks as only another writer can.

I know this from experience, naturally. The first thing I said to many of my dearest friends in the world was, “So, what do you write?”

To which the savvy conference-goer replies — chant it with me now, everyone — the magic first hundred words.

In fact, the first people I told about my first book deal — after my s.o. and my mother, of course — were people I had met in precisely this manner. Why call them first? Because ordinary people, the kind who don’t spend all of their spare time creating new realities out of whole cloth, honestly, truly, sincerely, often have difficulty understanding the pressures and timelines that rule writers’ lives.

Case in point: the FIRST words by mother-in-law uttered after hearing that my book had sold: “What do you mean, it’s not coming out until the autumn of 2009? Why the delay?”

This kind of response is, unfortunately, common. I don’t think any writer ever gets used to seeing her non-writer friends’ faces fall upon being told that the book won’t be coming out for a year, at least, after the sale that’s just happened, or that signing with an agent does not automatically equal a publication contract, or that not every book is headed for the bestseller list.

Thought I got off track from the question of how to keep from getting stressed out, didn’t you? Actually, I didn’t: finding buddies to go through the conference process with you can help you feel grounded throughout.

Not only are these new buddies great potential first readers for your manuscripts, future writing group members, and people to invite to book readings, they’re also folks to pass notes to during talks. (Minor disobedience, I find, is a terrific way to blow off steam.) You can hear about the high points of classes you don’t attend from them afterward.

And who wouldn’t rather walk into a room with 300 strangers and one keynote speaker with a new-found chum than alone?

Making friends within the hectic conference environment will help you retain a sense of being a valuable, interesting individual far better than keeping to yourself, and the long-term benefits are endless.

To paraphrase Goethe, it is not the formal structures that make the world fell warm and friendly; friends make the earth feel like an inhabited garden.

So please, for your own sake: make some friends at the conference, so you will have someone to pick up the phone and call when the agent of your dreams falls in love with your first chapter and asks to see the entire book! And get to enjoy the vicarious thrill when your writing friends leap their hurdles, too.

This can be a very lonely business; I can tell you from experience, nothing brightens your day like opening your e-mail when you’re really discouraged to find a message from a friend who’s just sold a book or landed an agent.

Well, okay, I’ll admit it: getting a call from your agent telling you that YOU’ve just sold a book is rather more of a day-brightener. As is the call saying, “I love your work, and I want to represent you.” But the other is still awfully darned good.

One more little thing that will help keep you from stressing out too much: while it’s always nice if you can be so comfortable with your pitch that you can give it from memory, it’s probably fair to assume that you’re going to be a LITTLE bit nervous during your meetings.

So do yourself a favor — write it all down; give yourself permission to read it when the time comes, if you feel that will help you. Really, it’s considered perfectly acceptable, and it will keep you from forgetting key points.

I would advise writing on the top of the paper, in great big letters: BREATHE!

Do remember to pat yourself on the back occasionally, too, for being brave enough to put yourself on the line for your work. As with querying and submitting, it requires genuine guts to submit your ideas to the pros; I don’t think writers get enough credit for that.

In that spirit, I’m going to confess: I have one other conference-going ritual, something I do just before I walk into any convention center, anywhere, anytime, either to teach or to pitch. It’s not as nice or as public-spirited as the other techniques I have described, but I find it is terrific for the mental health. I go away by myself somewhere and play at top volume Joe Jackson’s song Hit Single and Jill Sobule’s (I Don’t Want to Get) Bitter.

The former, a charming story about dumbing down a song so it will hit big on the pop charts, includes the PERFECT lyric to hum walking into a pitch meeting:

And when I think of all the years of finding out
What I already knew
Now I spead myself around
And you can have 3 minutes, too…

If that doesn’t summarize the difference between pitching your work verbally and being judged on the quality of the writing itself, I should like to know what does. (Sorry, Joe: I would have preferred to link above to your site, but your site mysteriously doesn’t include lyrics.)

The latter, a song about complaining, concludes with a pretty good mantra for any conference-goer:

So I’ll smile with the rest, wishing everyone the best
And know the one who made it made it because she was actually pretty good.
‘Cause I don’t want to get bitter
I don’t want to turn cruel

I hum that one a LOT during conferences, I’ll admit. Helpful, I find, when a bestselling author whose agent is her college roommate’s cousin tells a roomful of people who have been querying for the past five years that good writing always finds a home. Perhaps, but certainly not easily.

What you’re trying to do certainly is not easy, or fun, but you can do it. You’re your book’s best advocate. And remember, all you’re trying to do is to get these nice people to take a look at your writing. No more, no less.

It’s a perfectly reasonable request, and you’re going to be terrific at making it, because you’ve been sensible and brave enough to face your fears and prepare like a professional.

Take a deep breath on me, everyone, and 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 The exclusivity dilemma, part III, or where strategy and ethics overlap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/marjons-tulip-2.jpg

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!

/marjons-tulip.jpg/marjons-tulip.jpg/marjons-tulip.jpg

Posted on - 5 Comments on Book marketing 101: tracking the wily agent in the wild

Book marketing 101: tracking the wily agent in the wild

Yes, I am sticking my toe back into the blogging pool again today, but don’t worry: I’m dictating this immediately after an afternoon-long nap, whilst wrapped up to my nose in blankets, reclining on a couch, clutching a mug of herbal tea AND using a long-ago post as a crib. No low-tech effort has been spared, you see, to render this post as minimally energy-sapping as possible.

I’m anxious, you see, to get you out querying before the industry’s long winter’s snooze. This week marks the Frankfurt Book Fair, an annual literary extravaganza that leaves many high-powered agencies and publishing houses down a few bodies each fall, but from next week through Thanksgiving is prime querying time.

It’s a good time to send out a few additional queries even if you are already on the query-a-week plan — and especially if the best agent in the known universe has the full manuscript of your novel sitting on her desk even as I write this.

As my long-time readers are well aware, I’m of the keep-querying-until-the ink-is-actually-dry-on-the-contract school of thought. Think of keeping the query flow going as insurance: if, heaven forefend, something goes wrong with your top prospect, you will have possible alternates waiting in the wings. Or at the very least will be spared the effort of having to come up with a new prospect from scratch.

I’ve said it before, and I shall no doubt say it again: contrary to pervasive belief amongst aspiring writers, being sought-after by more than one agent is a GOOD thing — after all, nothing speeds up reading turn-around like the news that another agent has already made an offer.

I know it’s tempting to rest on your laurels while waiting to hear back on a partial or a full, but believe me, if — heaven forefend — the answer is no, you will be far, far, FAR happier if you have already begun to seek out pastures anew. The law of inertia tells us that a process already in motion tends to remain in motion; as anyone who has done serious time in the querying trenches can tell you, it takes quite a bit more energy to restart your querying engines again after they have gone cold than to keep plowing forward.

I know you’re tired of querying; it’s a whole lot of work. You have my sympathy, really. Now go out and send a couple of fresh queries this week. And next. Repeat until you’re picked up.

But to keep that flow going, you’re going to need to generate a hefty list of prospects. Today, as promised, I am going to talk about how to find agents to query — not just any agents, but the kind of agents who represent writing like yours.

And by writing like yours, I don’t mean books along vaguely similar lines — I’m talking about books in the same marketing category.

Didn’t I tell you that those exercises earlier in the Book Marketing 101 series would come in handy later on? Those of you who have been reading all the way through should already have a fairly clear idea of which categories come closest to your work — and if you do not, please see the BOOK CATEGORIES category at right.

Why is nailing down your marketing category so important? Because it is the language agents and editors use to describe books. Until you know in which category (or categories; many overlap) your baby falls, you will have great difficulty not only understanding agents express their professional preferences at conferences, but also deciphering their wants as stated in agency guides and on their websites.

I cannot overstress the importance of targeting only agents appropriate to your work, rather than taking a scattershot approach. I’ve written about why at some length in this series, so I shall not repeat myself, except to say that if you’ve ever heard a successful agent talk about the business for five consecutive minutes, chances are you’ve already heard four times that one of the biggest mistakes the average aspiring writer makes is to regard all agents as equally desirable, and thus equally smart to approach.

As a rule, they don’t like being treated as generic representatives of their line of work, rather than highly-focused professionals who deal in particular types of books. This is true, incidentally, even of those agents who list every type of book known to man in the agency guides. Go figure.

As I mentioned earlier in this Book Marketing 101 series, the single best thing you can do to increase your chances of acceptance is to write to a specific person — and for a specific reason, which you should state in the letter. Agents all have specialties; they expect writers to be aware of them.

Later in this series, I will go into why this isn’t a particularly fair expectation, but for now, suffice it to say that it’s expected. Within the industry, respecting the agents’ preferences in this respect marks the difference between the kind of writer that they take seriously and the vast majority that they don’t.

This is probably old news to most of you, right? If you’re taking the time to do research on the industry online, you have probably encountered this advice before, right? Although perhaps not its corollary: don’t approach agents — at conferences, via e-mail, or through queries — unless they have a PROVEN track record of representing your type of writing successfully.

This is for your protection, as much as to increase your probability of querying success. Think about it: do you really want to be your new agent’s FIRST client in a particular genre?

Of course not; it will be twice as hard to sell your book. You want an agent who already has connections with editors who buy your type of work on a daily basis.

Which brings me to the most logical first step for seeking out agents to query. If you attended a conference this year, now is the time to send letters to the agents to whom you were NOT able to pitch.

However, be smart about it: don’t bother to query those who client lists do not include books like yours.

I’m dead serious about this. No matter how much you may have liked the agent personally at the conference: the second easiest ground of rejection, after a “Dear Agent” salutation, is when the query is for a kind of book that the agent does not represent; like “Dear Agent,” an agency screener does not need to read more than a couple of lines of this type of query in order to plop it into the rejection pile.

Allow me to repeat: this is true, no matter how much you may have liked the agent when you met her, or how well you thought the two of you clicked, or that the second agent from the left on the panel bears a startling resemblance to your beloved long-ago junior high school French teacher. Deciding whom to represent is a business decision, not a sentimental one — and it will save you a tremendous amount of time and chagrin if you approach selecting your querying list on the same basis.

So do a little homework first. If you didn’t take good notes at the conference about who was looking for what kind of book (and didn’t keep in touch with the person sitting next to you, scribbling like a fiend), check out the standard agents’ guides, where such information abounds.

Then, when you find the right fits, go ahead and write the name of the conference on the outside of your query envelopes, and mention having heard the agent speak at the conference in the first line of your letter; at most agencies, this will automatically put your query into a different pile, because conference attendees are generally assumed to be more industry-savvy, and thus more likely to be querying with market-ready work, than other writers.

If you went to a big conference, this strategy might yield half a dozen more agents to query. Where do you go after that?

This is a serious question, one that I have argued long and hard should be addressed explicitly in seminars at writing conferences. Far too many aspiring writers abandon their querying quests too soon after their first conferences, assuming — wrongly — that once they have exhausted the array of attending agents, they have plumbed the depth and breadth of the industry.

This is simply not true. The agents who show up at any given conference are just that — the agents who happened to show up for that particular conference, people with individual tastes and professional preferences. If you didn’t strike lucky with that group, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you would have the same luck with another.

But obviously, conferences are expensive; few writers can afford to attend an unlimited number of them. So how else can you find out who is eager to represent what?

The common wisdom on the subject, according to most writing guides and classes, is that you should start with the agents of writers whose work you like, advice predicated on the often untrue assumption that all of us are so myopic that we will only read writers whose work resembles ours.

Me, I’m not so egocentric: I read books by a whole lot of living writers, most of whose styles are nothing at all like mine; if I want a style like my own, I read my own work.

However, especially if you write in a genre of NF, querying your favorite authors’ agents is not a bad idea. Certainly, the books already on your shelves are the easiest to check the acknowledgments page for thank-yous.

Actually, you should get into the habit of checking these pages anyway, if you are planning on a career in this business: one of the best conversation-starters you can possibly whip out is, “Oh, you worked on Author X’s work, didn’t you? I remember that she said wonderful things about you.”

Trust me, there is not an agent or editor in the business who will not be flattered by such a statement. You would be amazed at how few of the writers who approach them are even remotely familiar with the average agent’s track record. But who doesn’t like to be recognized and complimented on his work?

So, knowing this about human nature, make an educated guess: would an agent would be more or less likely to ask to see pages from a writer whose well-targeted query began, “Since you so ably represented Author X’s GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL, I believe you will be interested in my work…”

You bet your boots, baby.

So I hear some disgruntled murmuring out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you call out, “I already knew about querying agents I saw at conferences and checking acknowledgement pages. Aren’t there more creative ways to expand my query list?”

As a matter of fact, there are — but even as a dictator (dictatrix?), I have run out of steam for today. Hang in there, folks, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 7 Comments on Book marketing 101: scanning your query letter for problems, or, the magnifying glass of love

Book marketing 101: scanning your query letter for problems, or, the magnifying glass of love

/snapshot-2007-08-31-20-56-07.tiff

I was prepping a box chock-full of copies of my novel to head out the post office — some agencies ask for one and bill the writer for photocopying after the book sells, others have the author do the copying herself, which is usually less expensive; my agency falls in the latter category — when it hit me that this was a book that I never had to query. I just told my agent about it, and we went from there.

Which made me wonder: had I mentioned here that while selling the first book project to an agent is notoriously difficult, as anyone who has submitted a book knows, but that subsequent projects are comparatively a piece of cake?

Translation: once you get really, really good at querying and reap the rewards by landing an agent, chances are that you’ll never have to do it again.

The Peter Principle in action, my friends: the system is set up to promote the most gifted queriers out of the querying realm. Oh, you will need to write synopses for future works, and you might be asked to pen some marketing material, but cold-querying, no.

While you are in the querying stage of your career, it’s is a good idea to have several out at a time, rather than only one. Since response times can be slow, sending out one and waiting for a response before mailing the next can cumulatively add months or even years to the querying process — from which it is your goal to graduate, right?

Seriously, ignore the astonishingly long-lived rumors circulating out there that claim that agents get miffed if you query more than one of them at once. Manhattan-based agents, bless their harried little hearts, tend to people who get impatient if the guy in front of them at the deli counter is taking an extra thirty seconds to decide whether he wants turkey on rye or roast beef on a bagel — waiting a month or two between marketing attempts would not really be their style, were they limping along in your moccasins.

Unless their agency literature specifically says that they will accept only exclusive queries and submissions, they EXPECT writers to be querying rafts of agents simultaneously. So don’t let the rumors to the contrary discourage you from querying widely.

This does not mean that I would advise sending out 50 queries simultaneously — it’s just too hard to keep track of that many. Also — and I hesitate to mention this, but it happens — this strategy substantially increases the likelihood of opening your mailbox to discover more than one rejection in a single day’s post, an eventuality that would knock even the most confident aspiring writer for a loop.

Call me zany, but I would like to see you get through this process with as few bootless cries of “Why me?” flung in the general direction of the heavens.

As I mentioned yesterday, it’s a great idea to have your list of agents ready, so you can send out a new one the very day a rejection comes in — or two, if the aforementioned mailbox contretemps should befall you, heaven forefend. That way, you can do something constructive in response to that silly form letter, rather than letting the negative feelings sink into your psyche long enough that you start to believe them yourself.

And remember: no matter how much an agent may insist that “there’s no market for this right now” or “there’s not enough money to be made with this book,” and no matter how prominent that agent may be, ultimately, a rejection is one person’s personal opinion. Accept it as such, and move on.

But before you do, make sure that your query does not contain any red flags that might be preventing your work from getting a fair reading.

This is not just a good idea strategically — it’s a good idea psychologically as well, if you’re in the biz for the long haul. Unfortunately, many writers automatically assume that it’s the idea of the book being rejected, rather than a bland querying letter or a confusing synopsis. Or, still more hurtful, that somehow the rejecting agents are magically seeing past the query to the book itself, decreeing from without having read it that the writing is not worth reading — and thus that the writer should not be writing.

This particular fear leaps like a lion onto many aspiring writers, dragging them off the path to future efforts: it is the first cousin that dangerous, self-hating myth that afflicts too many of us, leading to despair, the notion that if one is REALLY talented, the first draft, the first query, and the first book will automatically traject one to stardom.

It almost never works like that: writing is work, and part of that work is being persistent in submitting your writing.

Instead of listening to the growls of the self-doubt lion, consider the far more likely possibility that it is your marketing materials that are being used as an excuse to reject your queries. If you can ever manage to corner someone who has worked as an agency screener for more than a day, believe me, the FIRST thing she will tell you about the process is that she was given a list of red flags to use as rejection criteria for queries. And, oddly enough, many of these criteria are not about the book project at all, but the presentation of the submission packet.

The single most common culprit, believe it or not, is typos. (And no, that was not a typo.)

Read over your query letter, synopsis, and first chapter; better still, read them over AND have someone you trust read it over as well, checking for logical holes and grammatical problems. The best choice for this is another writer, ideally one who has successfully traversed the perils of the agent-finding ravine already. Writing groups are also tremendous resources for this kind of feedback, as are those nice people you met at a conference recently.

Remember, we’re all in this together, my friends; let’s help one another out.

But long-time readers, chant it with me now: avoid using your nearest and dearest as proofreaders, much less content readers. As much as you may love your mother, your spouse, and your best friend, they are, generally speaking not the best judges of your writing, unless they have won a Nobel Prize in Literature recently.

And often not even then. Look to them for support and encouragement, not for technical feedback. Find someone whose opinion you trust — what about one of those great writers you met at the last conference you attended? — and blandish her into giving your query letter and synopsis a solid reading.

Lest you think I am casting unwarranted aspersions upon your mother, your spouse, or your best friend, let me add that my own fabulous mother has spent the last fifty years editing the work of some pretty heavy-hitting writers; she is one of the best line editors I have ever seen, in my professional opinion, but as she is my mother, I would never dream of using her as my only, or indeed even my primary, feedback source.

Naturally, that doesn’t stop her from compulsively line editing while she reads my work, of course; seriously, when I visited her last week, I had not been in her apartment two minutes before she said, “Oh, I read that chapter you sent me. Let me just dig up my list of what you should change.”

In a family of writers and editors, this is an expression of love, believe it or not, and something that I do automatically as well. Years of professional editing causes a particular type of myopia that prevents one from ever reading again without brandishing a vicious pen that attacks margins with the intensity of a charging rhinoceros.

All that being said, I respect my work enough to want my first reader feedback to be from someone who has not been a fan of my writing since I wrote my first puppet play, ALEXANDRA MEETS DRACULA, in kindergarten.

(Alexandra wins, by the way.)

As always, make sure that you read everything in hard copy, not just on a computer screen; the average person reads material on a screen 70% faster than the same words on a page, so which method do you think provides better proofreading leverage?

Uh-huh. There’s a reason that my mother doesn’t want me to send her e-mailed attachments upon which to vent her love and editing pen.

Speaking of which, I’m going to sign off for today, to give my box o’ manuscripts the once-over before I seal the box. Even those of us trained from the cradle to spot typos occasionally miss them, and even though I did not query this novel, I want it to do well with editors.

If only to prompt them to say, “My, but that’s a clean, well-proofread manuscript. This author’s mother must love her very much.”

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 8 Comments on Book marketing 101: why bad rejections happen to good books

Book marketing 101: why bad rejections happen to good books

I’ve been talking for a few days about the goals of the query letter and how to achieve them without sounding as though you’re trying to sell the agent vacation home land in Florida. In that spirit, I thought some of you might find it useful to see what a really good query letter looks like. To make the example more useful, I’ve picked a book in the public domain whose story you might know: MADAME BOVARY.

Before I launch into it, however, I want to emphasize that I am NOT posting it so you can copy it verbatim, but so you may see what the theory looks like in practice. Rote reproductions of purportedly never-fail wording abound in rejection piles; a version does not need to touted as THE perfect template for very long before the Millicents of the agency world start rolling their collective eyes at it.

Why should that be the case? Well, contrary to what many aspiring writers seem to think, there is no such thing as a perfect query letter. Just as there is no infallible pick-up line that will work with every English-speaking female on the planet (sorry, boys, but it’s true), there is no one type of query that will appeal to every agent.

There are, however, ones that appear more professional than others. Here’s an example that rates higher on that scale — and to get the full effect, please imagine it with the indented paragraphs that my blogging program prevents:

Ms. Savvy Marketer
Picky & Pickier Literary Management
0000 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 00000

Dear Ms. Marketer:

I very much enjoyed your recent article in THE WRITER magazine. Since you so ably represented First-Time Author’s debut novel, FRENCH LADIES IN LOVE, I hope you will be interested in my women’s fiction book, MADAME BOVARY.

Emma Bovary is a beautiful woman who knows what she wants out of life: great, overwhelming love, the kind of romance she has read about in novels. Yet her husband, Charles, is so insensitive to nuance that she arrives in her new home on her wedding day to find his dead first wife’s bridal bouquet still languishing in the closet. Finding herself married to the most ordinary of men and operating on an even more ordinary income, she must create romance on her own. In pursuing her dream of a love-filled, glamorous life, she puts her marriage, child, respectability, and even life in jeopardy.

Emma Bovary’s dilemma will be familiar to many novel readers, an echo of an often unspoken but nevertheless strong longing to live a fantasy life. Rather than ridiculing the heroine for her ambitions, as in Stendhal’s bestselling THE RED AND THE BLACK, or making light of the social problems of such a pursuit would entail, like Thackeray’s VANITY FAIR, MADAME BOVARY concentrates on the quotidian tradeoffs already familiar to readers’ lives: living with having married the wrong man, feeling unappreciated, the difficulty in obtaining arsenic for home use.

I am seeking an agent sensitive to the complexities and charm of the mundane, who can help me not only market this book, but who is also interested in working with me to develop my continuing career as a novelist. I may be reached at the address and phone number below (or would be, had the telephone been invented yet), as well as via e-mail at MmeB@yahoo.com.

Thank you for your time in considering this. I am including a SASE for your reply.

Sincerely,

Gustave Flaubert
1234 Hovel Lane, apartment just below the moldy rafters
Paris
(789) 665-2298

(That’s not Flaubert’s real address or phone number, by the way, just in case any of you were thinking of indulging in a spot of time travel.)

Didn’t that make you want to read the book? There’s a reason for that: this query letter makes the book sound interesting without being too pushy or arrogant. Better still, the summary includes a telling detail that will stick in the agent’s mind — investing a sentence’s worth of space in his precious single page in a compelling, original image certainly paid off for Mssr. Flaubert here, didn’t it?

But let’s assume that Mssr. Flaubert had not done his homework. What might his query letter have looked like then?

Picky & Pickier Literary Management
0000 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 00000

Dear Agent:

You’ve never read anything like my fiction novel, MADAME BOVARY. This is one opportunity you’d be a fool to miss!

MADAME BOVARY is a story of lust, greed, and unscrupulousness, set against the backdrop of provincial France. The poet Baudelaire once told me over absinthe that it’s the greatest novel of the 19th century, and I’m sure you’ll agree.

I know agents are notoriously risk-averse and cowardly, but why not take a chance on an unknown writer, for a change? You’ll be glad you did.

Sincerely,

Gustave Flaubert

Now, I respect my readers’ intelligence far too much to go through point by point, explaining what’s wrong with this second letter. Obviously, the contractions are far too casual for a professional missive, and fiction novel is logically redundant. (All novels are fiction, right?) I’d bet my last sou that our pal Gustave didn’t even include a SASE, since he didn’t bother to give the unnamed agent an address where he could be reached.

The primary thing to note here: even a great book will be rejected at the query letter stage if it is pitched poorly.

This comes as a big surprise to most aspiring writers. Yes, many fiction agents would snap up Mssr. Flaubert in a heartbeat after reading his wonderful prose – provided, of course, that the agents in question represented women’s fiction, did not just have their hearts broken by a similar book that didn’t sell three months ago, and are in their right minds, literarily speaking.

But even the agent who is the best match with MADAME BOVARY will not pick it up unless the query letter (or the pitch) convinced her it was worth her time to read. With a query letter like the second, the probability of any agent’s asking to read it is close to zero — and thus another great novel languishes in the rejection pile.

Depressing, isn’t it? But let’s not forget an important corollary to this realization, one that you may find empowering: even a book as genuinely gorgeous as MADAME BOVARY would not see the inside of a Borders today unless Flaubert kept sending out query letters, rather than curling up in a ball after the first rejection.

Yes, I know: deep down, pretty much every writer believes that if she were REALLY talented, her work would get picked up without her having to market it hard, or practically at all.

C’mon, admit it, you’ve had the fantasy: you’re home writing, there’s a knock on your door, and when you open it, there’s the perfect agent standing there, contract in hand. “I heard that your work is wonderful,” the agent says. “May I come in and talk about it?’

Or perhaps in your preferred version, you go to a conference and pitch your work for the first time. The agent of your dreams, naturally, falls over backwards in his chair; after sal volitale has been administered to revive him from his faint, he cries, “That’s it! The book I’ve been looking for my whole professional life!”

Or, still more common, you send your first query letter to an agent, and you receive a phone call two days later, asking to see the entire manuscript. Three days after you overnight it to New York, the agent calls to say that she stayed up all night reading it, and is dying to represent you. Could you fly to New York immediately, so she could introduce you to the people who are going to pay a million dollars for your rights?

Fantasy is all very well in its place, but while you are trying to find an agent, please do not be swayed by it. Writing is a business, as well as an art. If you are looking for work, you apply for a lot of jobs, right?

Don’t send out only one query at a time; it’s truly a waste of your efforts. Try to keep 7 or 8 out at any given moment.

Did I hear some gasps of incredulity out there? “What do you mean, 7 or 8 at any given time?” the shocked cry. “I’ve been rejected ten times. Doesn’t that mean I should lock myself away and revise the book completely before I sent it out again!”

In a word, no.

Oh, feel free to lock yourself up and revise to your heart’s content, but if you have a completed manuscript in your desk drawer, you should try to keep a constant flow of query letters heading out your door, even while you are revising it.

As they say in the biz, the only manuscript that can never be sold is the one that is never submitted. (For a great, inspiring cheerleading essay on how writers talk themselves out of believing this salient truth, check out Carolyn See’s Making a Literary Life.)

Keeping a constant flow is a good idea, professionally speaking. It’s psychologically damaging to allow a query letter to molder on your desktop: after awhile, that form letter can start to seem very personally damning, and a single rejection from a single agent can start to feel like an entire industry’s indictment of your work.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: one of the most self-destructive of conference-circuit rumors is the notion that if a book is good, it will automatically be picked up by the first agent that sees it. Or the fifth, for that matter. Or the fiftieth.

This is simply untrue; nothing in this process is automatic. (Except, apparently, for Millicent’s reaching for that too-hot latte every time she goes near her desk, like Pavlov’s dog.)

It is not uncommon for wonderful books to go through dozens of queries, and even many rounds of query-revision-query-revision before being picked up. As long-time readers of this blog are already aware, there are hundreds of reasons that agents and their screeners reject manuscripts, the most common being that they do not represent the particular kind of book being queried.

At the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, how precisely is such a rejection a reflection on the quality of the writing in the book??

Keep on sending out those queries a hundred times, if necessary. The single healthiest thing you can do when a rejection lands in your mailbox is to open it, check the rejecter off your master list of who you have sent what, toss the letter in the recycling bin — and send out the next query letter immediately.

And I do mean right away, before your complex writerly mind starts to embroider upon that (usually form) rejection letter, making it seem more important than it is. Until you can blandish the right agent into reading your book, you’re just not going to know for sure whether it is marketable or not. Keep on trying until you know for sure.

And, as always, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 4 Comments on Book marketing 101: try, try again; repeat

Book marketing 101: try, try again; repeat

After I brought up the very, very short amount of time a writer has to grab an agent’s attention in a query letter, I had a few qualms about being so up front about it: it’s accurate, but I don’t want to discourage anyone from trying, after all. I just think that it helps the querying writer to have a realistic sense of just how tough the competition actually is, so he can hone his marketing materials accordingly.

This is not an endeavor where close-enough makes the grade, generally speaking. Nor the first try. And yet the opposite presumptions seem to prevail.

That’s a real problem, when good writers who spend months perfecting their prose often just throw together query letters and synopses — and then query only a few agents. I’ve seen it happen too often. Every time I attend a major conference, in fact.

Why do I associate this behavior with post-conference periods? Because so many attendees walk out of a good literary conference either jazzed-up to submit (because of how they heard agents and editors speak about books in general)or completely depressed (because of how they heard agents and editors speak about the submission process and the current market in particular). Or, even more common, vacillating between the two mental states.

And then, bless their hopeful hearts, they tend to do one of two things:

a) Send out a query (or submission, if requested) to only their favorite agent or editor, waiting for a response from that one before moving on to the next, petering out before they get all the way through the list of category-appropriate agents who attended the conference, or,

b) Send out queries to several (or to everyone who requested submissions), wait to hear back from them all, and then stop querying for a while if none of the responses is positive.

“I gave it my best shot,” these well-meaning writers say afterward, discouraged. “The publishing industry didn’t want my book.”

To be blunt, I don’t think this is either the most effective or the most sanity-preserving way to go about querying. Finding the right fit is a PROCESS, not a one-time Hail Mary free-throw shot.

By all means, query all of those agents who spoke so eloquently about your book category at that conference, but try not to think of them as the only options out there. Think of them instead as the first set of targets in your ongoing marketing push for your book.

And for heaven’s sake, don’t assume the book is unmarketable if those first few agents say no. As I’ve mentioned before, an agent who reads only your query, or even your query and synopsis, cannot logically be rejecting your BOOK, or even your writing; to pass a legitimate opinion on either, she would have to read some of your work.

So there.

No, unless the agency you are querying is one of the increasingly rare ones that asks querants to include a brief writing sample, what is being rejected in a query letter is either the letter itself — for unprofessionalism, lack of clarity, or simply not being a kind of book that particular agent represents — the premise of the book, or the book category. So, logically speaking, there is NO WAY that even a stack of rejection letters reaching to the moon could be a rejection of your talents as a writer, provided those rejections came entirely from cold querying.

Makes you feel just the tiniest bit better to think of rejections that way, doesn’t it?

I would suggest a couple of courses of action as a reasonable response to this realization. First, accept the fact that pretty much all good writers these days go through a quite a few queries before being picked up, and keep sending out those queries. Second, if you’ve been sending out handfuls of queries to category-appropriate agents and have not been asked to submit pages, take a good, hard look at your query letter.

Actually, it’s not a bad idea to take a good, hard look at it in any case, to weed out the most common problems. A successful query letter has ALL of the following traits:

(1) it is clearly written, with no typos;

(2) it is polite;

(3) it is less than 1 page — single-spaced, with 1-inch margins and in 12-point type;

(4) it describes the book’s premise (not the entire book; that’s the job of the synopsis) in an engaging manner;

(5) it is clear about what kind of book is being pitched;

(6) it includes a SASE (and mentions that fact, in case the envelope gets lost),

(7) it is addressed to an agent with a successful track record in representing the type of book it is pitching, and

(8) it conveys clear why the writer picked that particular agent to query.

You would not BELIEVE how few query letters that agencies receive exhibit all eight of these traits. And confidentially, agents rather like that, because it makes it oh-so-easy to reject 85% of what they receive within seconds.

No fuss, no muss, no reading beyond, say, line 2. A query addressed to “Dear Agent” or “To Whom It May Concern,” rather than to a specific individual, can be rejected without reading any of the text at all. As can one without a SASE. Millicent can get through a lot more queries in an hour, when such problems are rife.

A particularly common omission: the book category.

I’ve heard many agents complain over the years that they just can’t understand why a talented writer would leave out something as basic as what kind of book being pitched — or even, I kid you not, whether the book is fictionor nonfiction — but I think I have a pretty good notion why. Because, you see, many writers simply don’t know that the industry runs on book categories.

But think of it from the other side of the desk. It would be literally impossible for an agent to sell a book to a publisher without a category label — in an agent’s pitch, it’s usually mentioned before either the title or the premise. And since literally no agency represents every kind of book, or even every kind of novel, category is the typically the first thing an agency screener is trained to spot in a query.

Knowing that, think about Millicent’s mood immediately after she’s burnt her lip on that latte. How likely is she to feel charitable toward a query that makes her search for the category or — sacre bleu! — guess it?

Other writers, bless their warm, fuzzy, and devious hearts, think that they are being clever by omitting the book type, lest their work be rejected on category grounds. “This agency doesn’t represent mysteries,” this type of strategizer thinks, “so I just won’t tell them until they’ve fallen in love with my writing.”

I have a shocking bit of news for you, Napolèon: the industry simply doesn’t work that way. If Millicent does not know where the book mentioned will eventually rest on a shelf in Barnes & Noble, she’s not going to want to read it.

Do I see some raised hands out there? You, in the front row: “But Anne, not all books, particularly novels, fall into obvious categories! What if I’m genuinely not sure?”

Good question, You. Yes, for most books, particularly novels, there can be legitimate debate about which shelf would most happily house it, and agents recategorize their clients’ work all the time (it’s happened to me more than once). However, people in the industry speak and even think of books by category, so you’re not going to win any Brownie points with them by making them guess what kind of book you’re trying to get them to read.

There was a good reason that I insisted upon walking you through all of the constituent parts of the pitch earlier in the Book Marketing 101 series: part of learning to market your writing well involves developing the skills to describe it in terms the industry will understand. When in doubt, pick the category that coincides with what the agency (or, better still, particular agent to whom you are addressing your query letter) represents.

If you found the last paragraph mystifying, please see the posts under the BOOK CATEGORIES heading at right. Scroll down until you find the entries on how to decide which is for you, and study it as if it were the Rosetta Stone.

In a sense, it is: book categories provide terms of translation between the often mutually incomprehensible conceptions of manuscripts held by their authors and the people they are asking to represent them.

Think of your query letter as a personal ad. (Oh, come on, admit it: everyone reads them from time to time, if only to see what the new kink du jour is.) In it, you are introducing yourself to someone with whom you are hoping to have a long-term relationship – which, ideally, it will be; I have close relatives with whom I have less frequent and less cordial contact than with my agent – and as such, you are trying to make a good impression.

So which do you think is more likely to draw a total stranger to you, ambiguity or specificity in how you describe yourself?

This is a serious question. Look at your query letter and ponder: have you, as so many personal ads and queries do, been describing yourself in only the vaguest terms, hoping that Mr. or Ms. Right will read your mind correctly and pick yours out of the crowd of ads? Or have you figured out precisely what it is you want from a potential partner, as well as what you have to give in return, and spelled it out?

To the eye of an agent or screener who sees hundreds of these appeals per week, writers who do not specify book categories are like personal ad placers who forget to list minor points like their genders or sexual orientation.

Yes, it really is that basic, in their world.

And writers who hedge their bets by describing their books in hybrid terms, as in “it’s a cross between a political thriller and a historical romance, with helpful gardening tips thrown in,” are to professional eyes the equivalent of personal ad placers so insecure about their own appeal that they say they are into, “long walks on the beach, javelin throwing, or whatever.”

Trust me, to the eyes of the industry, this kind of complexity doesn’t make you look interesting, or your book like an innovative genre-crosser. To them, this at best looks like an attempt to curry favor by indicating that the writer in question is willing to manhandle his book in order to make it anything the agent wants.

At worst, it comes across as the writer’s being so solipsistic that he assumes that it’s the query-reader’s job to guess what “whatever” means in this context.

Again: just how cordially do you think Millicent is going to respond to an invitation to play a guessing game with a total stranger?

Be specific, and describe your work in the language she will understand. Because otherwise, you run the risk that she’s just not going to understand the book you are offering well enough to know that any agent in her right mind should read it.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 4 Comments on Book marketing 101: the post-conference query

Book marketing 101: the post-conference query

Let no one say that laptops have not changed the way writers work: right now, I am sitting in an internet café facing the Pacific Ocean, watching indigo fog roll across a 180 degree view of what Wallace Stevens would have called indolent ocean. That’s a far cry from staring at the wall above the typewriter back in the good old days, eh?

This time of year, a lot of intrepid conference pitchers are feverishly reworking their first 50 pp. or entire manuscripts (hooray!) to send out to the agents and editors who requested them. But today, I would like to talk about how to handle those slippery folk whom you conference-goers never managed to buttonhole, despite your best efforts.

Don’t blame yourself if you weren’t able to pitch to every agent who represents your kind of work at any given conference. Some agents are virtually impossible to track down. (Rumor has it, for instance, that the agents who attended a certain local conference-that-shall remain nameless were blessed with prodigious bladders, scant appetites, and plenty of behind-the-scenes parties, so they were seldom seen in the hallways for more than a second or two.)

Today, I want to talk about how to approach all of those folks you missed.

I believe it is ALWAYS legitimate to use an agent’s having appeared at a writers’ conference you attended as a personal invitation to query — in theory, they would not be there if they were not looking to sign new authors, right? (This is not always true in practice, but hey, for the sake of argument, let’s assume it is, just for today.)

So if you so much as saw the agent’s name on a conference program, and s/he represents your type of work, go ahead and write “CONFERENCE NAME” in gigantic letters on the outside of the envelope, and begin your query letter with, “I so enjoyed hearing you speak at the recent XX conference, and based upon what you said, I believe you will be interested in my book…”

These are both legitimate tricks of the trade to get your submission read more quickly.

Do be sure before you lick the envelope, of course, that the agent in question actually DID speak at the conference you mention. At the recent PNWA conference (oops), not all of the advertised agents and editors were able to show up, for various reasons. Does this mean these fine folks are not available for subsequent querying?

Heavens, no. It’s usually not worth your time to query an editor to whom you did not pitch (especially as all of the major houses have policies precluding their editors from signing unagented novelists), but if an agent in your area was advertised to attend, it’s fair to take this as a sign that s/he is open — nay, eager — to hear from new writers.

If you were interested in one of the no-shows, the outside of your query envelope should be handled exactly in the same way as the one described above, but your query letter should begin with some permutation of, “I was so sorry to have missed seeing you at the recent XYZ conference, because I believe that my book will interest you…”

I hear some of you murmuring out there — and who could blame you? — “Why is Anne harping so much on the outside of the envelope, when it’s the quality of the submission within that will determine whether the agent will want to see more? And hasn’t Anne been impressing upon us for a couple of years now that the first person to read ANY submission to an agency, be it requested chapters or a query, is generally a screener, and not the agent herself? If the agent is not going to see the outside of the envelope, why does it matter what it looks like?”

Reasonable questions, all, and well worth my ignoring the spectacularly beautiful seascape in front of me to address. Because I was a trifle vague yesterday about how it typically works (and because I haven’t gone over it in a while), let me take you inside the average Manhattan-based agency, once that receives 800+ queries per week. I think it is safe to assume that the excellent employees of the US Postal Service must harbor some resentment toward agencies, because of all that heavy, heavy paper some luckless mail carrier must deliver every day.

Once there, it is all dumped on the desk of a screener, often an intern (translation: this person may not even be paid to be there; she just wants to be an agent some day, and is collecting some résumé candy. If he is paid, it’s a pittance.). Let’s call him George, and assume that his unhappy lot is to decide which 2% out of this morass of pleas should be passed on to his (paid) superiors at the agency.

Got that image firmly in your mind? Good. Now think about the moment when your query letter first touches George’s damp fingertips.

Since he is a bright boy (he’s a junior majoring in English Literature at Columbia, and he has NO idea how he is going to manage to pay off his student loans, if all of his early agency jobs pay as poorly as this one – and in all probability, they will.), obviously, the first thing George does when he receives a new mail delivery is to pull out everything marked REQUESTED MATERIALS: that goes into the top-priority pile. Then there is everything else, opened in the order that his hand happens to fall upon it.

Note that George is already scanning the outside of the envelopes, looking for clues as to what magic awaits within. Any envelope with a clear indication is going to make his life easier, right?

And that, dear friends, is going to get your query placed in a read-first pile, even if the agent who attended the conference did not (as some do) order George and his ilk to set all of the conference attendees’ queries aside into a special pile.

After all, 98% of the querying writers in North America NEVER attend a conference at all; as agents like to tell anyone who seems remotely interested in the matter, queries from conference attendees tend to be far more professionally presented.

Something I devoutly hope is true of queries from my readers as well, but no one is tracking statistics on that yet. I would like to report that writing “Reader of Anne Mini’s blog” on the outside of your envelopes provokes the same hope, but alas, that is not yet true.

But tomorrow, the world!

It pains me to say it, but I HAVE heard of some clever and unscrupulous writers who take advantage of the pervasive agency belief in the power of conferring to label their envelopes untruthfully. Since at a large conference, agents frequently will not remember everyone they asked to send material, I have known certain black-hearted souls who went ahead and wrote REQUESTED MATERIALS on the outside of — gasp! — unrequested materials. After all, they reason, how is George to know? They’re right, usually: he won’t know the difference.

I strongly advise against this strategy, however, on ethical grounds: for all you know, the karmic record-keeper assigned to track your triumphs and misdeeds was a literary agent in her last life.

Don’t tempt that lightning bolt. Zeus is notoriously testy about integrity amongst artists.

Another common, clever, and unscrupulous method adopted by those who would transfer their work into the read-first pile is to troll the net for literary conferences (large ones work best), jot down the names of the attending agents, and send “Gee, I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet you at the recent YY conference, but…” queries with appropriately garnished envelopes. (This only works, of course, if the agent in question actually showed up there.) Oh, this is not good. How on earth am I going to convince you not to do it?

Hmm. It may take me weeks, or even months, to come up with a truly compelling argument that will keep my readers’ feet firmly planted on the paths of virtue. I guess you’re just going to have to consult your own consciences until then.

Whatever strategic choices you may make (hey, I believe in free will), white, gray, or buff Manila envelope, please, for any submission longer than 6 pages — more than 5 might make a normal business-size envelope tear in the post. Use high-quality (at least 20 lb.) white paper for EVERY sheet that you intend to have touched by an agent.

Why? Well, if you’re lucky, that query and submission are going to pass through quite a few hands at the agency. Do you have any idea how fast poor-quality paper wilts when it is handled by hands that have just clutched an iced latté or walked inside after brisk walk back from a power lunch on a sweltering New York day?

Tomorrow, I shall deal with some of the common mistakes made in query letters, but for today, one final piece of advice: even if you garnered permission to send your first 50 pp. to several great agents — and more power to you if you did — please consider querying the other agents who attended the conference as well, if their interests seem anywhere close to yours. And do it soon, before you hear back from the others.

I know, I know, this may seem unnecessary, or even disrespectful to those who have asked you for a peek at your baby. But listen: agencies take time to read material; since most of the publishing industry takes vacation between mid-August and Labor Day, in all probability, you will not hear back on all of your submissions before the fall. Even George may be on vacation right now. Poor lamb, his eyes need the rest.

That’s a month of your life, and if — heaven forefend! — none of the requesters is ultimately interested, won’t you be happier if you already have second-round requests lined up?

The post-conference advantage fades when the days start to cool, my friends. Get your work under as many already-primed eyes before the Georges of tomorrow will no longer recognize the initials PNWA. Yes, it is time-consuming to keep querying, but honestly, it takes less energy to keep seven or eight queries out at any given time than to start from scratch each time you (again, heaven forefend) receive a “Sorry, but this is not for us” missive.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: dealing with the Grand Silence, part III, or, what actually happens to those reams of paper you submit

Book marketing 101: dealing with the Grand Silence, part III, or, what actually happens to those reams of paper you submit

For the past couple of days, I’ve been celebrating the publishing world’s practice of virtually shutting down between mid-August and Labor Day by re-running some posts about adapting to the industry’s sense of time. It can be substantially different from what the rest of us mortals expect, and being aware of that can save a writer a whole lot of grief and stress at submission time.

Tomorrow, I shall be diving into the fine art of querying, the topic which will round the Summer of Marketing to a close. Hey, I didn’t dub this series Book Marketing 101 for nothing: in case it snuck up on you or you joined us late, this summer has been an intensive course in marketing here at Author! Author! Like the rest of the industry, my thoughts will turn back to craft after Labor Day.

Enjoy! Or, if not precisely enjoy, I hope it makes you gnaw on your fingernails less over the next few weeks.

Over the past week or so, I have been writing about the inadvertent etiquette gaffes writers new to the business often commit, costing them credibility points with agents. A couple of days ago, I brought up several examples of the kind of writer who has a hard time understanding that while his manuscripts us the most important single item in the universe to him, to an agent, it is one of hundreds, or even thousands – and this is true REGARDLESS OF THE QUALITY OF THE WRITING.

I know with is hard to accept. It is counterintuitive, and we’ve all heard stories about how this or that book was picked up in a flash. If you scratch those stories, however, you’ll usually discover that the books to which they refer either came out 20+ years ago, however, or their writers had actually been shopping their books around for quite a while first.

Like, say, the first in the Harry Potter series, AUNTIE MAME, and THE FIRST WIVES’ CLUB.

We hear fewer of these long-struggle stories than we used to, I notice. After a well-established writer had made a few turns around the conference circuit, accounts of struggle tend to shrink: the more famous a writer is, the shorter a time he claims it took him to find an agent.

But not understanding that agencies deal in hundreds of pounds of submitted paper per week – thus rendering the probability of any given one getting read out of order slim – can lead to some pretty dire consequences for the writer.

Why? Because we’re constitutionally incapable of NOT trying to second-guess what’s taking so damned long. Observe the plight of our next exemplar:

Writer-centered scenario 4: After sending out his second round of queries, Harold has received a request to submit from agent Hermione. Delighted, he prepares his packet with care, making sure to send only precisely what Hermione has asked him to send, and mails it off.

And he waits. While normally he would spend a couple of hours per week preparing fresh queries, he abandons this effort while he is waiting for Hermione’s reply. What would be the point? He’d only have to contact all of those agencies after Hermione has made an offer, anyway.

After the first week, Harold is disappointed not to have heard back. By the fourth, he’s genuinely begun to worry. By the end of the eighth, he’s distraught. Still, he’s always heard on the conference circuit that one should NEVER call an agent, so he sits tight.

By the time the third month has passed, Harold has come up with an explanation to justify the wait: Hermione, he has concluded, read his submission as soon as it came in, and now everyone else in the agency is reading it. Or she read it, and has been thinking ever since about whether to pick it up.

Ultimately, he never hears back. After six months, he begins sending winsome little e-mails to her, asking her whether she has made up her mind yet.

Hermione never responds. Rumor has it that she has started an anonymous agenting blog where she complains humorously about being stalked by writers. Harold is stunned to see some of his own missives posted there, as warnings to others.

Okay, where did Harold go wrong?

First, he fell prey to that same bugbear I was discussing earlier in the week, the notion that a requesting agent will – and should – drop everything the instant his manuscript arrives, in order to give it her full attention. It’s an unrealistic expectation, however, and leads to tremendous amounts of unnecessary chagrin.

Many, if not most, aspiring writers want to believe that talent is the universal solvent of business-as-usual, but that is simply not true – and furthermore, is based upon a commonly-held misconception about what happens to submissions after they arrive at an agency. The fantasy generally runs like this: the day’s mail comes in, containing Manuscript X. The agent pounces upon it, rips open the packaging, peruses it instantly, and makes a decision on the spot whether to represent the author.

The reality, on the other hand, runs more like this: the day’s mail comes in, and the agency’s screener is charged with opening it. If a package is marked REQUESTED MATERIALS, it will usually be opened first, but otherwise, the screener just sorts it. Manuscript X is then sent along to the first submission screener, who will open the package and check that the submission conforms to the agency’s submission requirements. If not, it can be dealt with immediately: rejection.

This, by the way, is the reason that bad news often travels faster than good, in this business.

If it passes that first-glance test, Manuscript X will then sit in a pile until the screener has time to read it. If the manuscript is wonderful, the screener will write a brief report for the agent; otherwise, the manuscript is sent back to the author. At many agencies, a manuscript that passes the first round successfully will be given to a second screener. If she likes it, she too will write a report, and Manuscript X will be passed along to the agent.

Then, and only then, will the agent read it. But, given how busy agents tend to be, Manuscript X might easily begin to decompose while it is sitting on her desk. Paper is, after all, biodegradable. So Harold, and writers like him, wait.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: be realistic in your time expectations. If you haven’t heard back from an agent or editor, 99% of the time it’s because your manuscript has yet to be read. Even if they were reading submissions the second they received them, agents and editors are too specialized, and too busy to drop everything to attend to even the most promising new client.

There’s a very good reason for this, too: they make their living by selling books, not by acquiring new clients. In order to stay in business, proportionally little of an agent’s time CAN be spent gobbling up new submissions. In fact, most of the agents I know don’t have time to read in their offices at all; they wrestle stacks of manuscripts home on the subway, to read in their spare time. They actually do love good writing, for the most part: they just don’t have much time to devote to indulging that love.

Trust me, after you have signed with the agent of your dreams, you’ll be happy that she spends the vast majority of her time selling your work, rather than hunting up new clients.

So where does this leave poor Harold? Well, in a sense, he was right: his submission probably was being passed up the food chain. But his further supposition that Hermione would have read his work and was pondering it is unrealistic: everyone along the chain I’ve described above reads far too many manuscripts in any given month, or even any given week, to reserve brain space for reconsidering past reads.

Okay, I think I’ve beaten that late equine enough. But here’s the kicker: what should he have done differently?

Well, in the first place, Harold never should have stopped querying while he was waiting to hear back from Hermione. If another agent had asked him to submit, Harold would have had a legitimate reason to contact Hermione right away: I thought you would want to know that another agent is also looking at my book. That alone probably would have speeded up the process.

Without such an excuse at the ready, though, what should Harold have done? Well, he might have used his imagination to come up with the single most likely explanation for an ultra-long delay: his manuscript may have gotten lost. After 8 weeks or so, he should have sent an e-mail, letter, or even – gasp! – a phone call, politely asking if the agency had received his submission packet.

Or, if he were genuinely shy, he could have sent another copy of the submission, with a cover letter saying that he feared that his earlier package had been lost. My point is, by following up in a businesslike manner, Harold would have offended no one, and if his package had actually been lost, he could have remedied the situation.

Having waited too long to follow up, however, Harold was wrong to bug Hermione on an ongoing basis. After 6 months, she probably will not recognize his name or any reference to his project; she may just read it as an offbeat attempt at querying. Remember, it is not beyond belief that she never saw the submission at all – it might have gotten stalled at the screening level. So coy reminders of his existence are probably not going to do Harold any good whatsoever.

I know submission is a tough, nerve-wracking process, but do try to be reasonable: unless the agency or agent is brand-new, I can absolutely guarantee you that yours is not the only stack of paper it received on any given day. Nor, unless you are already a celebrity or a minor deity with the power to cause your submission packet to glow with an unearthly radiance, did all ongoing business stop the instant your manuscript crossed the threshold. Expect it to take some time.

And if you have not heard back within a reasonable amount of time, treat it as you would any other business lapse. Be polite and call it to the agency’s attention.

But most of all, keep moving. And, of course, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Submission faux pas, continued: it’s all about ME

Submission faux pas, continued: it’s all about ME

I love my readers: eagle-eyed Serenissima wrote in to point out that in my eagerness to tell you yesterday that our exemplar Daphne should have followed Digory’s instructions, I forgot to add HOW she should have followed them. (I’d fill those of you who missed yesterday’s post in on what I’m talking about, but that would make it too easy, wouldn’t it?) Yes, since agent Digory asked for 50 pages, Daphne should have sent exactly 50 pages – no more, no less, even if that meant cutting off the story mid-sentence.

But should she try not to have page 50 end mid-sentence? Should she try to arrange her plot so there is a section break there? Or, even more strategic, so there is a cliffhanger there?

Agents are quite, quite used to their requested page limits’ causing odd breaks, so do not worry about leaving ‘em hanging. (The ones who are truly married to closure will ask for entire chapters, not specific numbers of pages.) For this reason, it can appear a bit contrived if page 50 just happens to be the end of a chapter or section – although arranging the end of a section to fall on the last page is often a good idea for a contest entry, where it would be impossible for the judge to request more pages.

Never forget: the primary goal of those first 50 pages — or whatever part of the manuscript the agent has requested – is not to satisfy the agent’s sense of dramatic closure, but to get him to request the rest of the manuscript. Tying up ends too neatly might actually work against your aims here.

It’s nice if the agent finishes page 50 wondering what happens next – but as it’s not necessary to induce him to lie awake nights wondering what happens on page 51, rearranging your writing so a cliffhanger falls on page 50 (or whatever the last page of the submission may be) should not keep YOU awake nights. Leaving him wondering what happens in the rest of the book is sufficient – which, if you’ve established a sense of tension and conflict in the first 49 pages, he should already be doing.

In other words: you don’t need a murder to occur on page 50, necessarily, and it may well come across as heavy-handed if the last line on that page reads, “’I’ve been poisoned!’ Angelica cried. “And the culprit is”

Got it? Good. All right, on to the meat of today’s post.

Over the past few months, I have noticed an ailment cropping up with astonishing frequency amongst writers of my acquaintance. It’s a syndrome that, in its mild form, can drive writers to lose confidence in their work after only a few queries, and in its most virulent form, can alienate agents and editors before they’ve even read a word that the writer has penned.

And, to make it harder to head off at the pass, or to diagnose before symptoms develop, this syndrome leads to behavior that a professional writer, one who was actually making a living at it, would never even consider doing. So, naturally, it had never occurred to me that writers I know, good ones with probably quite bright futures, were engaging in it – and it might be hurting their publication prospects. So today I’m going to flag it, so none of my dear readers get caught in this quite common trap.

I refer, of course, to the notion that ANY book by a first-time author – be it absolutely the latest word in literary fiction, the mystery that even Perry Mason couldn’t solve before page 355, or the next DA VINCI CODE – would be so exciting to agents and editors that they would drop everything else to pay attention to it.

Or, potentially even more damaging, that they SHOULD, and that the writer has a right to expect instantaneous responses. Or even very quick ones.

Now, I have mentioned the most common corollary to this belief many times before: the insidious idea that if a book is really good (or, more usually, if its writer is truly talented), that the first query, the first pitch, the first submission will instantly traject it into a cozy lifetime relationship with the perfect agent or editor.

Oh, you laugh, but deep down, most of us would love to believe that our work is so redolent with talent that it will be the exception to the long turn-around time norm. The fantasy is a compelling one: place a stamp on a query on Monday, receive a request for the full manuscript by the end of the week, sign before a fortnight has elapsed, sell to a prominent publisher by Arbor Day. For those who query via e-mail, the expected timeline runs even faster: query tonight, request tomorrow, sign by next Wednesday, sale by April Fool’s Day.

I wish I could tell you it could happen, but as long-time readers of this blog already know, the industry just doesn’t work that way. Occasionally, people strike lucky, but a good writer should EXPECT to have to try many agents before being signed, and to have to wait weeks or even months to hear back from agents and editors.

So, in case any of you have missed the other 147 times I’ve said it in the last few months: it just doesn’t make sense to query or submit to agents one at a time. No matter how much you like a particular agent. Giving in to the notion that good work gets picked up immediately may cause a writer to take years to cover the requisite array of agents to find the right one, or even to stop querying in frustration after only a few tries.

Strategically, either is a bad idea. Competition over who is going to represent you, like competition over who is going to publish your book, can only help you, and unless an agent asks you point-blank for an exclusive look (which you are under no obligation to grant), these days, most agents ASSUME that a writer is sending out simultaneous submissions.

But the larger assumption, the one that dictates an expectation that ANY book is a drop-my-other-hundred-projects occasion for an agent or editor, is even more dangerous, because it can lead to behavior that is not only unlikely to convince industry types of a writer’s professionalism, but might even alienate them permanently. It can – sacre bleu! – lead to a writer’s being pushy.

Why is this a problem? Because as anyone in the industry can tell you, there is no book for which every agent is holding his breath. Naturally, everyone would like to snap up the next bestseller, of course, but since no one really knows what that will be, and they spend their lives surrounded by so much paper that the average agency could use it for insulation, it would simply be too exhausting to leap upon each new submission as though it contained the philosopher’s stone.

Even if that book turns out to be HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE. They need time to read, and no matter how much you would like yours to be the only submission on your dream agent’s desk at any given moment, yours is probably going to be one of fifty.

So there can be no legitimate reason, in their minds, for a writer to act as if HER book is THE one. Even if it is.

But try telling that to some writers. As in the most common manifestation of all:

Writer-centered scenario 1: Marcel has been working on his novel for a decade. Finally, after showing it timorously to his lover and a couple of roués claiming to be artistes he met at the corner café, he decides it is ready to submit. Being a careful sort of person, he researches agencies, and finally settles on the one that represents his favorite writer.

He submits his work, fully expecting to hear back within the week. By the end of a month, he is both flabbergasted and furious: why hasn’t that agent gotten back to him? As the sixth week ticks by, he decides that there is no point in hoping anymore. When his SASE and manuscript finally arrive back on his doorstep at the beginning of week 9, he doesn’t even bother to open the packet. He pitches them straight into the recycling bin.

He never submits again. Instead, he hangs out in absinthe bars with his amis, bemoaning the fact that the publishing world has refused to see his genius.

Okay, what did Marcel do wrong? (Other than drinking absinthe, which I’m told is pretty lethal.)

Oh, let me count the ways. Give yourself an A if you said he assumed that a single agent’s reaction was identical to that of everyone’s in the publishing world, as if rejection once means rejection eternally. What does Marcel think, that every agent in the country gets together every night under the cover of dark to share the day’s submissions, so every agent can provide a uniform response?

(Actually, there is a pervasive rumor like this that surfaces on the conference circuit every year or two about a national database where agents log in the names and book titles of every rejection, so that once a manuscript has been seen by a couple of agents, the others will know to avoid it. Piffle.)

Like it or not, the belief that one agent equaled the industry actually stems not from insecurity, but from an extreme case of egoism on Marcel’s part. Rather than considering himself one of the literal millions submitting manuscripts each year, or pondering the notion that he might need to learn a bit more about the industry before he can submit successfully, he prefers to conclude that his IDEAS are too out there for the cowardly market.

At least, he concludes that aloud: in his heart, he may actually believe that no one is interested in what he has to say. In this, he would be far from alone: there are plenty of Marcels out there who never send their books out even once.

Was that great collective “OH!” I just heard indicative of realizing that you know a writer like Marcel? Most of us do. The Marcels of the world are the ones who are all talk, and no query.

It takes real guts to pick yourself up after a rejection and send your work out again. It’s mighty tempting to give up, isn’t it? So give yourself an A+ if you pointed out by giving up so easily, Marcel never has to risk his ego’s being demolished by rejection again.

Extra credit with a cherry on top if you noticed that Marcel sought feedback only from his lover and friends, who could not possibly give him unbiased critique.

But you’re too clever to follow Marcel’s route in any of those three respects, aren’t you, readers? You know that a single rejection cannot logically mean that the book is unmarketable, that your writing is no good, or that you should give up writing altogether. Even a dozen rejections do not necessarily mean that: what an individual rejection means is that the agency in question didn’t like something about the submission.

Try to improve your submissions, by all means, but keep trying. Having to send out your work again and again is not – I repeat, is NOT – necessarily a reflection upon the quality of your writing, although it often is a reflection of how it is presented on the page. (Thus my continual yammering on the joys of standard format.)

Keep your chins up, campers. And keep up the good work.

Posted on - 5 Comments on A final word on queries

A final word on queries

How did everyone’s query letter do in the countdown? Well, I hope. If you find yourself in perplexity about some aspect of the missive, feel free to ask questions via the comments function, below. (But please, I implore you, do NOT just e-mail me your query letter. I’m swamped.)

Before I sign off on the topic of querying for the time being, in order to retackle contest entries with renewed enthusiasm, however, I want to speak today about the extraordinarily difficult task of keeping yourself from stressing out while your queries are wending their way through agencies thither and yon.

Keeping your spirits up is very seldom addressed in your average querying class, is it? And in most how-to publications out there, the implication is that since the advice contained therein will elevate your query letter from rejectable to irresistible in a few easy steps, there is no need to consider the possibility that a good writer might have to send quite a few of them out.

Frankly, I think this attitude – although probably meant to be chock-full o’ positive vibrations for your success – actually makes it harder for writers going through the querying process.

I wondered for a very long time where aspiring writers got the rather fantastic idea that talent is always recognized instantaneously, as if there were a special angel who did nothing all day but assure that any gifted writer’s copy of GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS would automatically fall open to the perfect fit. And then I started listening to the bigwig writers who spoke at the conferences where I was teaching. Turns out, conference speakers tend to be huge proponents of the notion that Somebody Up There sees to it that the gifted don’t have to query more than a handful of times.

While it would be easy to dismiss this attitude as self-aggrandizement – “You, the audience, may be struggling to get your work a fair reading, but I, the speaker, am so brilliant that agents appeared on my doorstep as soon as I printed out the first draft” – I don’t think that’s actually what’s behind this kind of assertion. I think that often, by the time a writer is prominent enough to be asked to speak (particularly to give a keynote speech) at a major conference, he tends to have landed his agent so long ago that the writing market has completely changed in the interim.

So, effectively, unless the speaker is unusually devoted to helping aspiring writers and is still in the trenches like yours truly, trying to assist others to get published, the story he is likely to tell will bear about as much resemblance to what a querier can expect now as your grandparents’ stories about their high school years bore to yours.

Wanna hear my father’s story about the first time he sat in a car? It was a Model A. Think that helped me learn to drive?

This was brought home very forcefully to me this fall, when I was teaching at a small conference packed to the gills with exceptionally talented writers who had made their names between 10 and 40 years ago. When asked about how to land an agent, these well-meaning souls to a man muttered the usual truisms about how good writing always finds a home, and all you really have to do is get someone to read it.

Which, to a writer new to the game who is at all savvy to the current hyper-competitive environment at agencies, could be heard very much as, “I’m all right, Jack; I’ve got mine.” Not overwhelmingly helpful, as guidance goes.

Then one of the writers I have admired for a very, very long time stepped up to the podium. She’s probably 15 years older than I am, which is to say that I estimated that she had hooked up with her agent just about the time when it started getting genuinely hard for good writers to find representation. The timing had a lot to do with the rise of the personal computer, by the way, and even more with the later rise of the internet: once writers did not have to laboriously retype or expensively photocopy every manuscript submitted, submissions to agencies went up exponentially; once writers could research agencies on the web, queries burgeoned.

In any case, I was in great hopes that this author, unlike the other speakers, would have a life story that might parallel the conference attendees’ struggles enough to be instructive. No such luck, alas: it turned out that she had been in an MFA program…

Lost you already, hasn’t she?

…and she went to a conference and made friends with an editor because she was crying over something. The editor read “the only good short story I had written so far,” introduced the writer to her best friend…

Uh-oh.

…who happened to be an excellent agent, and snapped her up immediately. Thus, the writer had never queried at all.

Well, that was helpful, wasn’t it?

Seriously, I think these types of stories depress writers who are querying now; they give new life to that old myth that real talent is always recognized instantly. In the current market – and actually, for most of the last 15 years since that lecturing writer had an agent magically fall into her lap like Newton’s apple – that just hasn’t been the case.

Trust me on this one: you will be a MUCH happier camper if you reconcile yourself NOW to the notion that you will probably need to send out dozens (and dozens, and maybe even dozens) of query letters before you land an agent – and that this most emphatically does NOT mean you are without talent, or that the publishing world is hostile to your work.

Once you accept that reality, sending out one letter at a time just seems, well, kind of silly, doesn’t it? If you’re going to need to get your work under many noses, it only makes sense to send out quite a few queries at a time. Not so many that you can’t keep track of who wants what, of course, but enough that when you hear back from one, you have others out there.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it’s emotionally FAR easier to keep a query cycle going than to start one from scratch. Especially if you are starting from scratch immediately after the agent of your dreams has just sent you a form-letter rejection. Many queries equal many possibilities: cumulatively, they help keep hope alive.

And anything that keeps hope hoppin’ is not something at which a writer should be sneezing, in this market.

Also, one-at-a-time querying is inefficient. This is an industry where tastes change in a matter of months, sometimes even weeks. If it takes you a year to query ten agents, it’s not beyond belief that by the end of that time, what the first agent is looking to acquire will have changed completely.

Seriously. I’ve seen it happen.

Let me knock another common writers’ conference truism on its nasty little head before anyone brings it up: it’s just not true that agents become angry if you submit to more than one of them at once. That was true in older, slower times, but frankly, it hasn’t been widely true since the Reagan Administration.

The FIRST Reagan Administration.

True, one occasionally does see notations in the standard agents’ guides stating that a particular agency prefers exclusive submissions. You know why that’s there? Because the expectation of exclusivity is so rare in the industry now that unless it is stated baldly up front, the assumption is that every agent on the planet accepts simultaneous submissions.

So there. Query early, query often, and don’t you dare conclude that no one wants your book until you’ve queried a hundred agents – and even then, make sure it’s your book that’s getting rejected, and not just your query letter.

Tomorrow, we shall rejoin our series on contest entries, already in progress. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Still more terms every writer should know, but many are afraid to ask

Still more terms every writer should know, but many are afraid to ask

Here are the rest of the industry glossary terms; every fiber of my being wants to call for a pop quiz now, but I am resisting the temptation with all of my might. Just a flashback to my former incarnation as an academic. It’ll pass.

 

Once again, if there is a term that you were waiting breathlessly for me to define that did not make the list, feel free to drop me a line via the COMMENTS function, below, and ask about it in the days and weeks ahead. It’s going to be a long, cold, dark winter, my friends (at least up here in Seattle, where the days start getting AWFULLY short after Halloween, and where already the squirrels and raccoons in my backyard are displaying a suspicious plumpness of fur), and nothing lights up a dreary day like a good industry-speak definition.

 

(Okay, okay — it’s possible I’m mistaken about that. But through the magic of self-delusion, I shall attempt to act as though I believe it all the same.)

 

Here are more definitions:

 

Rookie mistake, n.: An error in a manuscript or finished book that a pro would be unlikely to make, which betrays the fact that the writer (or sometimes, the editor) is new to the publishing industry. The classic rookie mistake is submitting a manuscript that is not in STANDARD FORMAT.

 

Shameless friend, n.: A writer’s buddy who appoints him/herself part time publicist for the writer’s work. A shameless friend does everything from gushing to everyone who will listen (“This is the best book in the world! You’ve got to read it now!”) to posting flattering reviews on Amazon to downright guerrilla marketing, such as picking up the friend’s book off the shelves at Barnes & Noble, walking around with it prominently displayed under her arm, and then setting it down casually on the bestseller table. (My standard shameless friend activity is to find my friends’ books and turn them face-out on the shelf, rather than spine-out, so they are more likely to sell.) The more shameless friends you can recruit before your book hits print, the better off you will be; other writers make terrific shameless friends. Treat them very well: they are worth many times their weight in gold.

 

Shelf life, n.: The length of time any given book will remain on a bookseller’s sales floor before being returned to the publisher or — stuff a pillow in your mouth, because this is horrible — being pulped. In some major bookselling chains that shall remain nameless, this time can be as short as three weeks, which leaves little time for word of mouth to develop. The moral: it really behooves an author to be out there plugging his book for the first few weeks after publication.

 

Ship date, n.: The date upon which actual copies of your book will be sent to booksellers (and those fine folks who pre-order my memoir on Amazon!), as opposed to the publication date, which is when bookstores may begin selling the tomes. You may have heard about this differential with respect to the latest HARRY POTTER book: bookstores had the books from the SHIP DATE, and thus were responsible for implementing security measures that would have made J. Edgar Hoover writhe with envy in order to prevent any copies from being leaked prior to the publication date. (Those of us who have friends who write book reviews have heard about this endlessly, because Scholastic has not sent out REVIEW COPIES for the last two HARRY POTTER books – so I know several book reviewers for major newspapers who were forced to buy the books at midnight like everybody else, read it overnight, and write the review before the next day’s deadline. Somehow, I suspect that sleep deprivation does not render a reviewer kindly.)

 

Simultaneous submission, v. (also known as MULTIPLE SUBMISSION): (1) The practice of querying more than one agent at the same time. Contrary to rumor amongst writers, most agents are more than willing to accept that the querying process is too time-consuming if the writer sends out only one submission at a time. If a given agent objects to the practice, the agency will say so explicitly in the standard agenting guides, so do check. (2) When agents send out a book (or book proposal) to several editors at once, in the hope of engendering competitive bidding. Not all agents favor this practice, particularly for fiction. (3) Being involved with more than one dominatrix at once.

 

SLUG LINE, n.: (1) The line in the top margin (either right or left-justified) of every page of a standard manuscript, bearing the following information in caps: author’s last name, abbreviated title, page #. Thus, every page of my memoir has MINI/A FAMILY DARKLY/# on it. (2) The trail left by a Pacific Northwest invertebrate.

 

SLUSH PILE, n.: The holding pen in a publishing house or agency where UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS await Judgment Day or for someone to have time to read them; basically, these books are on indefinite hold. In the bad old days, senior editors would buy pizza and beer for the junior editors one night per month, and everyone would sit around and go through the slush pile. Now, most of the major publishing houses will NEVER keep an unsolicited novel in the slush pile; it will simply be returned unread. A few still hold pizza parties for NF, but the practice has become exceptionally rare. The moral: bypassing the rules of submission is not very likely to work in your favor.

 

STANDARD FORMAT, n.: The way everyone in the publishing industry expects a manuscript to look. Manuscripts not in standard format are often discarded unread. (If you want to learn the rules of standard format, check out my posting of August 31.)

 

SUBSIDY PUBLISHING, v.: The act of printing and distributing a book with a press that purports to share the production expenses with the author. In fact, most subsidy presses charge authors significantly more than the actual cost of publication, as these presses’ profits tend to be derived from author contributions, rather than book sales. As a result, subsidy publishing is usually quite a bit more expensive for the author than SELF-PUBLISHING. Most of the time, the authors end up distributing the books themselves, and the vast majority of reviewing publications have hard-and-fast rules against reviewing books produced by subsidy presses.

 

SUBSTANTIVE EDITING, v.: Giving content feedback on a manuscript, as opposed to COPY EDITING or LINE EDITING, which is concerned with grammar and clarity. Increasingly, editors at major publishing houses have time to do neither kind of editing, which leaves the author in the uncomfortable position of editing her own book. (As soon as the final editing of my memoir is complete, I shall be blogging EXTENSIVELY about my experience with this phenomenon.)

 

SYNOPSIS, n.: A brief exposition in the present tense of the plot of a novel or the argument of a book. (See my blog of Sept. 9 for tips how to write a stellar synopsis.)

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS, n.: A list of chapter titles and the corresponding page numbers where those chapters begin in the book. Not to be confused with an Annotated Table of Contents, which is the 2-3 page section in the nonfiction book PROPOSAL which gives the title of each chapter, accompanied by a 2-3 sentence description of what is in each chapter; including a simple TABLE OF CONTENTS in a book proposal is one of the most common ROOKIE MISTAKES. The Annotated Table of Contents does not include projected page numbers. (For guidance on how to create an Annotated Table of Contents, or indeed any part of a NF book proposal, see my posting of August 29.)

 

TITLE PAGE, n.: (1) The page of a manuscript that contains the title (obviously), the author’s pen name, the author’s actual name, contact info for the author (or the author’s agent), book category, and WORD COUNT. (If you are in the throes of formatting a TITLE PAGE, check out my posting of Sept. 9 for tips.) (2) The page of a published book that contains the title, author’s name, and name of the publishing house. To format a manuscript’s title page like a published title page is a ROOKIE MISTAKE.

 

TRADE DISCOUNT, n.: The percentage off the cover price of a book granted by publishers to booksellers; generally, the trade discount is in the 40-50% range. Most PUBLICATION CONTRACTS specify that the author may purchase an unlimited number of books at the TRADE DISCOUNT, but let the author beware: books so purchased do not count toward the author’s sales totals.

 

TRADE LIST, n.: A publisher’s catalogue of all books currently in print. (If you want to see a real, live example, here is the link to my listing in my publisher’s catalogue: http://www.pgw.com/catalog/catalog.monthly.asp?ShipMonth=22006&Action=View&Index=Title&Book=344556&Order=43. You might want to check it out soon, because I suspect that a ROOKIE MISTAKE was made regarding the cover, and it may be changed soon.) The purpose of listing the ISBN and other publication data is to make it as easy as possible for booksellers and private citizens to order the book in question.

 

TRADE PAPER, n.: The level of print quality between hardcover and mass-market paperback; a book with high print standards, but no glossy dust jacket. Increasingly, publishers are releasing serious fiction and memoir in trade paper, bypassing the hardback stage entirely, because hardbacks are so very expensive to print.

 

TRANSLATION RIGHTS, pl. n.: The publication rights to an English-language book printed in any other language, sold on a by-language basis. (Perversely, books sold in English in Great Britain are considered to be foreign-language books for contractual purposes.) These are sold usually separately from the RIGHTS, which refers to first North American rights, minus Mexico. However, occasionally an American publisher will try to score a sweet deal and try to get the WORLD RIGHTS as part of the initial deal, but if the book is expected to have LEGS abroad, this generally does not work out well for the author: typically, if a book is reprinted in a second language and a North American house owns the foreign rights, the domestic publisher scrapes an automatic 20% off the top of any foreign-language royalties accrued by the author. (If this seems a trifle technical, it’s because I had rather a struggle to retain my memoir’s foreign rights; my publisher wanted ‘em, big time. But they’re mine, I tell you, all mine!)

 

UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPT, n.: (1) The doorstop of the publishing world. (2) Any book excerpts, up to and including entire manuscripts, sent to agents who have not asked for them. I tremble to tell you this, but often, these are sent INSTEAD of query letters, and thus end up as definition (1). (3) Any manuscript sent to a publishing house without the author’s first ascertaining that a specific editor there would like to see it. At best, these manuscripts end up in the SLUSH PILE; at worst, they are thrown out. (As nearly as I can tell, few publishing offices are serious about recycling, alas.)

 

VANITY PRESS, n.: (1) The more virulent version of a press that specializes in SUBSIDY PUBLISHING. Vanity presses often woo aspiring authors with misleading promises, in order to tempt writers into plunking down hard cash to see their words in print. (2) A SUBSIDY PUBLISHING press that produces extremely expensive, coffee-table quality books for its clients. (3) What almost everyone in the publishing industry calls a press that specializes in SUBSIDY PUBLISHING; a term of insult.

 

WOMEN’S FICTION, n.: A category of prose whose definition varies depending upon whom you ask. The more old-fashioned use it as a synonym for romance novel, often with a slight sneer, but these same people virtually never refer to thrillers as Men’s Fiction, although the actual purchase rates would indicate that this would be an apt moniker. Currently, the term is used to denote novels whose readership is expected to be overwhelmingly female. However, this is less descriptive than one might think: over 80% of the fiction purchased in North America is bought by women, including the vast majority of literary fiction. So there.

 

WORD COUNT, n.: Not, as one might imagine, the ACTUAL number of words in a document; no, that would be too easy. Rather, the actual number or words rounded to nearest 100 OR the number of manuscript pages in Times or Times New Roman multiplied by 250. The latter is the standard by which the publishing world operates.

 

WORLD RIGHTS, n.: First North American rights + all foreign rights = world rights.

 

WRITING RESUME, n.: A list of an author’s writing and speaking credentials. You should be maintaining one of these on an ongoing basis, and no, you don’t have to have been paid for a publication to include it here. Ideally, to keep your writing resume up to date, you should try to add at least one item to it per year: placing in a contest, giving a public reading of your work, publishing an article or story (no matter how small the publication…The idea here is to show that you have been spending your time while you wait to be discovered wisely, adding tools to your writer’s bag of tricks, so you will be ready when your big break comes.

 

YA (Young Adult), n. and adj.: The moniker attached to novels intended for readers from the ages of 12 to 17, despite the fact that literally no country in the world considers 12-year-olds to be adults. Created, as I understand it, by those who felt that “Children’s books” had a pejorative ring to it.

 

That’s the end of the alphabet — hurrah! Starting tomorrow, I shall be alternating between the kind of practical advice that I’ve been giving for most of the past month and blow-by-blow accounts of my memoir’s rather amusing and totally counterintuitive adventures traveling from contract to print. Follow my book’s hilarious journey from first book proposal to sale to traumatic lawsuit; look on in awe as I struggle to obtain ANY feedback from my editor, who has apparently taken a vow of silence; marvel at the bizarre sense of timing (wait three months, rush around for two days, wait two months, demand results overnight…) that renders it a perpetual miracle that any books are ever published at all!

 

And in the meantime, keep up the good work!

 

— Anne Mini

 

P.S.: For all of you kind souls who have tuned in because you heard on the grapevine about the threatened lawsuit against my memoir: while the legal folderol is going on, I’m actually not allowed to talk about it here in any amount of juicy detail, as much as I would LOVE to do so. In fact, some earlier discussions have required trimming, alas. Since it’s all very interesting — the question of who owns memories is certainly one that would have fascinated Philip K. Dick, and whether I can publish my own memories of him is the crux of the current case — I would love to be able to share the ins and outs on a daily basis, but my typing hands are tied, so to speak. I hope to be able to fill you in soon, though, in vivid Technicolor, so watch this space.