Author! Author!:: Anne Mini's Blog

Hello, readers —

Time for a quick jaunt back to synopsis land: sharp-eyed and insightful reader Bill has written in to ask: “Just how sacred is the four-page limit? How big should the margin be, since that can affect the word count?”

Good questions, Bill, and thanks for reminding me that I had not mentioned that the synopsis, like your first 50 pp., should be in standard format: 1-inch margins, double-spaced, in Times, Times New Roman, or Courier typeface. Printed on only one side of the page, of course, and on nice, crisp white paper. (This last might sound like window-dressing, but speaking as a frequent contest judge, I can tell you: it honestly is more pleasant to read a submission printed on nice paper. And don’t you want the agent or editor to ENJOY reading your submission?)
In Times or Times New Roman, a four-page synopsis is roughly 1000 words; no need to count, since 250 words/page in this typeface in standard format is how the industry estimates word count.

Go back and read that last sentence again, please, if you have been using your word processing program’s word counter to produce your word counts. THE INDUSTRY DOES NOT USE EXACT WORD COUNTS; IT RELIES UPON PAGE-BASED ESTIMATES. So you should, too: 250 words/page for Times or Times New Roman, 200 words/page for Courier.

Never mind that these are nowhere near accurate in actual word count: when in Rome, you need to use the same units of measurement as the Romans do; the state-by-state electoral vote count seldom bears much resemblance to the actual popular vote figures, but we still abide by whom the electors pick for president, right? Fighting for accuracy in word count estimation will get you nowhere, and in fact can even hurt your manuscript’s chances of being picked up by an agent: since professional word count estimates always end in a zero (think about it…), an odd-numbered word count on a title page or in a cover letter blatantly announced that the submitting author is new to the business. And, as you may have noticed, this is not a business that is very friendly to those who are not familiar with its rather esoteric ways.

The differential between actual and estimated word count, in case those of you who are veteran conference-goers were wondering, is why everyone on the agent panel goes pale (even under conference-center fluorescent lighting –which is saying something, since those lights make everyone look like a corpse) when some eager soul stands up and says, “I have a manuscript that’s 200,000 words, and…” Now, in actual word count terms, that’s probably in the neighborhood of 550 pages, but in industry estimation, that translates into 800 pages. Quite a difference, eh?

So in answer to your excellent first question, Bill: don’t worry about the actual word count of your synopsis; worry about the number of pages it covers. If it covers 3, 4, or 5, it’s fine.

I am going to revisit standard format again today, to make absolutely certain that every single reader of this blog who is planning to pitch at a conference this summer is aware of it well in advance.

Yes, yes, I know: those of you who are regular readers of this blog now exhibit a conditioned response to the term standard format; Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the bell, and you suddenly sit bolt upright, wondering if there was some unreported technical reason behind your last form rejection letter. You may, in fact, be tired of hearing about it.

However, in a submission to an agent or an editor, violations of standard format are serious business: when you’ve been asked to send chapters after a successful pitch, do you really want your pages to make you look unprofessional?

Here are the rules of standard format — and no, NONE of them are negotiable:

(1) All manuscripts must be typed and double-spaced, with at least one-inch margins on all sides of the page.

No exceptions, unless someone in the industry (or a contest’s rules) SPECIFICALLY ask you to do otherwise.

(2) All manuscripts are printed on ONE side of the page.

Again, unless you are asked to do otherwise — and yes, this IS wasteful of paper. The entire publishing industry is one vast paper-wasting enterprise. Deal with it.

(3) The text should be left justified ONLY.

A lot of writers squirm about this one. They want to believe that a professional manuscript looks exactly like a printed book, but the fact is, it shouldn’t. Yes, books feature text that runs in straight vertical lines along both side margins, and yes, your word processing program will replicate that, if you ask it nicely. But don’t: the straight margin should be the left one.

(4) The typeface should be 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier.

These are plain, not-too-pretty fonts, but they are in fact the standards of the publishing industry; it’s a throwback to the reign of the typewriter, which came in two typefaces, pica (a Courier equivalent) and elite (Times). As I’ve explained before, queries and manuscripts printed in other fonts are simply not taken as seriously.

If you want a specific font for your finished book, you should NOT use it in your manuscript, even if you found a very cool way to make your Elvin characters’ dialogue show up in Runic. The typeface ultimately used in the published book is a matter of discussion between you and your future editor — or, even more frequently, a decision made by the publishing house without the author’s input at all. If you try to illustrate the fabulousness of your desired typeface now, you run the risk of your manuscript being dismissed as unprofessional.

If you write screenplays, you may ONLY use Courier. Most screenplay agents will not read even the first page of a script in another typeface — which means that most contest judges will follow suit.

(5) No matter how cool your desired typeface looks, or how great the title page looks with 14-point type, keep the ENTIRE manuscript in the same font and typeface. Do not use boldface anywhere but on the title page.

Industry standard is 12-point. Again, no exceptions, INCLUDING YOUR TITLE PAGE. You may place your title in boldface, if you like, but that’s it.

There is literally no reason, short of including words in languages that have different scripts, to deviate from this. If you are a writer who likes to have different voices presented in different typefaces, or who chooses boldface for emphasis, this is not a forum where you can express those preferences freely. Sorry.

(6) Words in foreign languages should be italicized.

Including Elvish. You don’t want the agent of your dreams to think you’ve made a typo, do you?

(7) EVERY page in the manuscript should be numbered.

This one is generally an automatic rejection offense. The standard way to paginate is in the header, so see point #8.

(8) Each page should a standard slug line in the header, listing AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/ABBREVIATED TITLE/PAGE #.

The safest place for this is left-justified, but you can get away with right-justifying it as well. And the header, for those of you who don’t know, is the 1-inch margin at the top of the page.

(9) The first page of a chapter should begin a third of the way down the page.

That’s twelve single-spaced lines, incidentally. The chapter name (or merely “Chapter One”) may appear on the first line of the first page, but then nothing should appear until a third of the way down the page.

(10) The beginning of each paragraph should be indented five spaces.

Yes, I know that published books — particularly mysteries, I notice — often begin chapters and sections without indentation. Trust me, that was the editor’s choice, not the author’s, and copying the style here might get your work knocked out of consideration.

(11) Don’t skip an extra line between paragraphs.

This one is for all of you bloggers out there. The whole darned manuscript should be double-spaced, and paragraphs are all indented, so there is no need to skip a line to indicate a paragraph break. The ONLY exception is that you may skip an extra line to indicate a section break

(12) All numbers under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25.

Again, this was for the benefit of the manual typesetters, but I actually think this one makes sense. When numbers are entered as numbers, a single slip of a finger can result in an error, whereas when numbers are written out, the error has to be in the inputer’s mind.

(13) Dashes should be doubled — hyphens are single, as in self-congratulatory.

Yet another signal for ye olde typesetters, archaic but still honored. It was so they could tell when the author intended a dash, and when a hyphen.

Yes, I know that your word processing program will automatically change a doubled dash to a single one. Change it back, because you never know when a real stickler for format is going to end up as your contest judge.

(14) Dashes should have spaces at each end — rather than—like this.

Again, I know: books no longer preserve these spaces, for reasons of printing economy, and many writing teachers tell their students just to go ahead and eliminate them. But standard format is invariable upon this point. It’s a pain, true, but is it really worth annoying an agent over?

(15) The use of ANY brand name should be accompanied by the trademark symbol, as in Kleenex™.

If you catch an agent under the age of 30, or one who doesn’t have a graduate degree, you may get away without including the trademark symbol, but legally, you are not allowed to use a trademarked name without it. Writers — yes, and publishing houses, too — have actually been sued over this within the last couple of years, so be careful about it.

There you have it: literally every page of text (yes, including the synopsis, Bill), should be in standard format. Trust me, your work will be treated better if you follow these rules. A manuscript in standard format looks to the critical eye like a couple dressed in formal wear for a black-tie event: yes, it is possible that the hosts will be too nice to toss them out if they show up in a run-of-the-mill casual suits or jeans, but the properly-attired couple will be admitted happily. By dressing as the hosts wished, the couple is showing respect to the event and the people who asked them to attend.

Dress your work appropriately, and it will be a welcome guest at an agency or publishing house.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

First and foremost: there’s still time to pre-register for the PNWA Writing Connections class I shall be teaching on Saturday, Prepping a Pitch with Panache. It’s free to PNWA members, and I think I can safely promise that attending with lower your heart rate during any subsequent pitches to agent by at least 10 beats per minute, and reduce your chances of fainting while pitching to virtually zero.

Now that I’ve gone through the basics of a submission synopsis, I’m going to spend a couple of days on the first 50 pages of your book. Why would I want to do a thing like that, you ask? Well, if an agent or editor likes your conference pitch (or elevator speech, of which more next week), generally speaking, she will ask you to send a synopsis of the pitched book, an author bio (if you haven’t already written yours, check out my posts for April 11 — 14), and either the first 50 pages or the first chapter or two of the book. So, by the same logic that dictated that it would make a great deal of sense to snap your synopsis together BEFORE you’re asked for it, wouldn’t it make sense to take a gander at your first 50 pp., to make sure they sell your writing talent well?

Here is an excellent test to see how your submission will play with the pros at an agency. Sit down with your first 50 pp., IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD, or have a writing buddy whose judgment you trust do it for you. Select pages 6 through 50, and set them aside. Then pull out pages 2 through 5, and set them in a separate pile. You should now be holding the first page, and only the first page, in your hand.

Read it. If this were the ONLY page upon which someone were basing his opinion of your writing talent, how impressed would he be? What about if he were basing it solely upon the first five pages?

Truth of the trade: if an agency screener does not like your first page, he will generally not read the rest of your submission. And if he isn’t pretty taken with the book within the first five pages, there is virtually no chance that he will read on.

Picked your jaw up off the floor yet? When an agent or editor asks to see the first 50 pp., he is NOT committing to reading ALL of it. He is committing to reading as much of it as it takes until he is satisfied that he does not want to sign you. So your goal in the first 50 pages is not just to draw a reader into the story or argument, but also to survive a page-by-page reading where any significant mistake could knock your book out of the running.

Draconian, isn’t it? At minimum, it’s not very nice, but it IS an industry truism: you need to grab the reader on page 1, and if you haven’t wowed the reader by page 5, no one will read the rest. Yes, it’s stupid; yes, it’s not the way that the consumers who buy books in Barnes & Noble make their purchasing decisions, and yes, it’s REALLY annoying that novelists and writers of complex arguments are expected to compress 400 pages of subtlety to just a few demonstration paragraphs.

It is, however, the way things work.

If I ran the universe (and the last time I checked, I didn’t, or my publisher would not keep receiving gratuitous legal threats regarding my memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK), it would not work this way. Agents and their screeners would read AT LEAST the first 50 pages before they accepted or rejected a book. And cows would wander the streets of Manhattan, providing free chocolate milk to all the poor children.

You are marketing your work in the real world, though, so make sure that your first page — nay, your first paragraph — shines with some of your most eye-catching prose. As a general rule, anything you can do to place your best writing within the first few pages of your submission, you should do. And if you can include some very memorable incident or imagery within the first few paragraphs of your chapter, so much the better. Agents’ impressions tend to be formed very fast, and if you can wow ’em before page 5, you absolutely should.

Actually, just as with work you submit to contest, the first page of your entry is far and away the most important part of your submission packet. Unless there is a strong reason to place your synopsis first, put it at the end of your entry, so your first page can jump out at the screener.

Make sure that something significant HAPPENS on page 1, too — consider starting with a scene in which your protagonist is active, rather than devoting the opening to set-up, as 99% of submitted novels do. Set-up can always come later in the chapter, and (hold onto your jaws now, as this may startle you) it may not be in your best interests to use the Chapter 1 you envision for the actual book as your submission, if it’s not the most action-packed of the book. If it is logically possible, why not move your strongest, best-written scenes to the beginning of your submission?

Authors do that all the time. There’s no law saying that you can’t move them back to their proper places after you sign the contract. It’s called revision, not false advertising. Trust me: after your book is published, neither your agent nor your editor going to come after you and say, “Hey, your book doesn’t start with the scene that began your submission! Bad form!”

Actually, many of the authors who use this trick ultimately decide NOT to move the scene back, on the theory that what grabbed the agent will grab the reader. And now you know why so many literary fiction books (and quite a few others) begin with scenes that pure chronology would dictate should fall much later in the book: the authors wanted to hook that most important of early readers, an agent.

How can you move your best scene up front? Try plopping it down before your current opening, as a prologue. I wouldn’t recommend moving more than one scene: the more you move, the more ‘splaining you will have to do in what follows. But one strong, emotionally-dense, action-packed scene to grab the reader in the first page or two can be very smart marketing indeed.

By contrast, let’s take a look at what you would have to do to pull off a radical change in your book’s running order. A clever novelist who feels her best writing occurs 75 pages into her novel might, for the purposes of submission, place her strongest scene first by starting her book on page 75 (presenting it as page 1, of course). The synopsis would have to be revised, naturally, to make it appear that this is indeed the usual running order of the book, and our heroine would have to edit carefully, to make sure that there is nothing in the skipped-over pages that is vital to understanding what happens in the chapters presented in the submission. The job of the synopsis, then, in the hands of this tricky writer, would be to cover up the fact that the submission starts in the middle of the book. It would be just our little secret.

To put it in a less clever way: you can pull off starting later in the book, if the writing justifies it, but it’s a heck of a lot more work than simply moving one compelling scene. You also will need to make absolutely sure that your synopsis is compelling and lucid enough that it still all makes sense as a story.

“But wait!” I hear some of you out there cry. “What happens when the agent falls in love with my submission, and asks to see the rest of the book? Won’t it be apparent that I’ve misrepresented the running order? Won’t I in fact be placed in the position of having to rewrite the whole book in order to justify the submitted running order?”

Good question — and an excellent argument for moving only a single scene up front. There’s really no need to panic if you find yourself in this situation. Bear in mind that everything in the publishing industry moves either at the speed of light or with glacial slowness. It may well be one to three months between the time you submit your first 50 and when you hear back from the agent or editor (a period in which, incidentally, you SHOULD be querying other agents you met at the conference; a request for pages does NOT automatically imply an exclusive peek at your work, unless the agent or editor has specifically asked that you not submit it to anyone else). That’s quite a lot of revision time, isn’t it?

Even if you hear back more quickly, agents and editors are very used to writers fussing with their work. It’s perfectly acceptable to take a few weeks to revise your work before responding to a request to see the rest of the book. It is also quite acceptable — and quite common — for writers to respond to a rest-of-the-book request by sending the entirety of the book in its original running order, accompanied by a cover letter saying that since they submitted the original 50, they’ve been playing with the running order a little, and this is the result. As long as you say in the cover letter that you are open to changing the running order in accordance with the agent or editor in question’s preferences, there is nothing wrong with going this route.

In other words: established writers rearrange their work all the time for marketing purposes. Agents and editors are used to it, and generally are kind enough to write it off as merely symptomatic of the artistic temperament. We’re sensitive, you see: one day, we prefer a certain running order, then a flock of birds flutters by, and we’re equally convinced that a different running order is absolutely demanded for the book. In a word, they think we’re kind of flaky, as a group, and this is one of the few instances in which our perceived flakiness works in our favor. Milk it.

Above all, though, make sure that YOU absolutely love the pages you are submitting. Your first page should warm your heart, too. Sending your best writing, after all, is simply giving an accurate picture of your talent.

Never submit pages with which you are less than happy to an agent or editor, merely in order to get them out the door quickly. Chances are very, very slim that your submission will be read the instant it arrives, anyway, and often not by the same person to whom you gave your pitch, so you don’t need to worry about getting it there before the agent forgets who you are. You can pretty much rely on the agent’s needing to be reminded. That’s what the cover letter you send with your submission is for, the one that begins: “Thank you for asking to see the first fifty pages of TITLE. I enjoyed our conversation at PNWA, and I hope that you will be intrigued by my work.”

More on submissions tomorrow. In the meantime, for those of you who have not yet made your conference meeting choices because you don’t really know who these agents and editors are and what they represent, check out my archived blogs of April 26 — May 17 for the agents and May 18 — 26 for the editors.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Okay, I honestly am going to wrap up my synopsis-writing series today, so I can move on to a few words about prepping your manuscripts for the magical moment when the agent or editor of your dreams asks to see it, before launching into a full-on assault upon the subject of pitching your work! That’s a lot of material to cover over the next few weeks, campers, so stay tuned.

Back to yesterday’s list of questions you should ask yourself after you have completed a solid draft of your synopsis:

(4) Does the synopsis read as though I am genuinely excited about this book and eager to market it, or does it read as though I am deeply and justifiably angry that I had to write it at all?

This is a subtlety, a matter of tone rather than of content. Believe me, writerly resentment shows up BEAUTIFULLY against the backdrop of a synopsis, even ones that do not breathe an overt word about marketing. The VAST majority of synopses (particularly for novels) simply scream that their authors regarded the writing of them as tiresome busywork instituted by the industry to satisfy some sick, sadistic whim prevalent amongst agents, a hoop through which they enjoy seeing all of the doggies jump.

Show that you are professional enough to approach the synopsis as a marketing necessity it is. Remember, agents and editors do NOT ask writers for synopses because they are too lazy to read entire books: they ask for synopses because they receive so many submissions that, even with the best of wills, they could never possibly read them all. The synopsis, then, is your chance to make your work jump up and down and scream: “Me! Me! I’m the one out of 10,000 that you actually want to read, the one written by an author who is willing to work with you, instead of sulking over the way the industry runs!”

Mind you, I’m not saying that you SHOULDN’T sulk over the often arbitrary and unfair way the industry runs: actually, it would be merely Pollyannaish NOT to do that from time to time. Vent as often as you please; it’s healthier than keeping it inside. But it simply is not prudent to vent anywhere near an agent or editor whom you want to take on your work, and certainly not in the tone of the synopsis. The synopsis’ tone should match the book’s, and unless you happen to be writing about deeply resentful characters, it’s just not appropriate to sound clipped and disgruntled. Sorry.

(5) Does the first page of the synopsis SAY that it’s a synopsis? Does it also list the title of the book? And does every page of the synopsis contain the slug line AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/TITLE/SYNOPSIS/#?

I am always shocked at how few synopses identify either themselves or the author, due no doubt to a faith in the filing systems of literary agencies that borders on the childlike. Pages get separated; things get lost. Identify each and every page with a slug line, and tell the nice people that they’ve got a synopsis in their hands.

Standard format for a synopsis dictates that the title (either all in caps or bolded) is centered at the top of the first page of the synopsis, with “Synopsis” on the line below it. Then skip one double-spaced line, and begin the text of the synopsis.

(6) Is the synopsis absolutely free of errors of any kind? Not just what my word processing software tells me is an error, but an actual error?

Naturally, you should both spell-check and read the ENTIRETY of your synopsis IN HARD COPY, ALOUD, before you send it anywhere. Period. No excuses. As I mentioned yesterday, my professional editor hat gets all in a twist at the notion of any writer’s proofreading solely on a computer screen. It is well-nigh impossible to do with complete accuracy.

And don’t even get me started on the chronic inadequacies of most word processing programs’ grammar checkers! Mine disapproves of gerunds and semicolons, apparently on general principle, strips accent marks off French words, leaving them obscenely naked, and regularly advises me to use the wrong form of THERE. (If anybody working at Microsoft does not know the ABSOLUTELY IMMUTABLE rules governing when to use THERE, THEIR, AND THEY’RE, I beg you, drop me an e-mail, and I shall make everything clear.) Why, just a couple of days ago, when I wasn’t paying attention — hey, this is a busy month — it incorrectly changed a word in this very blog from “here” to “hear.”

I am fascinated, too, by the fact that its dictionary evidently does not contain any words that relate to the Internet or computer operations. Should I really have had to introduce “blogger” into its vocabulary? And I tremble to think how the grammar checker butchers dialogue. Suffice it to say, most standard word processing spelling and grammar checkers would condemn the entirety of Mark Twain’s opus outright.

My point is, like a therapist who doesn’t listen well enough to give good advice, a poor grammar checker cannot be sufficiently disregarded. Even in the unlikely event that your grammar checker was put together by someone remotely familiar with the English language as she is spoke, you should NEVER rely solely upon what it tells you to do. Read the manuscript for yourself.

If you’re in doubt on a particular point, look it up. In a well-regarded dictionary, not on the internet: contrary to popular opinion, most search engines will list both the proper spelling of a word and the most common misspellings. There is no gigantic cosmic English teacher monitoring proper spelling and grammar on the web. So get up, walk across the room, and pick up a physical dictionary. After so much time spent sitting in front of a monitor, the walk will do you good.

Made it through all of the questions above? After you have tinkered with the synopsis until you are happy with all of your answers, set your synopsis aside. Stop fooling with it. Seriously — there is such a thing as too much editing. Then, after you have gone to the conference and met the agent and/or editor to whom you will be sending it, read it again (IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD, naturally), and ask yourself a final question:

(8) Does my synopsis support the image of the book I want the requesting agent or editor to see? Would it be worth my while to modify it slightly in order to match more closely to what I told this sterling individual my book was about?

“Wait!” I hear some sharp readers out there cry. “Is Anne saying that it’s sometimes a good idea to tailor the synopsis to the particular agent or editor?”

Well caught, those of you who thought that. If an agent or editor expresses a strong personal preference for a particular theme or style in her speech at the agents’ and editors’ forum or in your meeting, isn’t it just common sense to tweak your already-existing synopsis so it will appeal to those specific likes? If your dream agent let slip in your meeting that she was really intrigued by a particular aspect of your story, doesn’t it make sense to play that part up a little in the synopsis?

A word of warning about pursuing this route: do NOT attempt it unless you have already written a general synopsis with which you are pleased and have saved it as a separate document. Save your modified synopsis as its own document, and think very carefully before you send it out to anyone BUT the agent or editor who expressed the opinions in question.

Why? Well, as I have been pointing out for almost a year now in this very forum, agents and editors are not a monolithic entity with a single collective opinion on what is good and what is bad writing. They are individuals, with individual tastes that vary wildly, sometimes even moment to moment, and certainly over the course of a career.

Think about it: was your favorite book when you were 13 also your favorite book when you were 30? Neither was any given agent’s. And isn’t your literary opinion rather different on the day you learned that you were being promoted at work and the day that your cat died? Or even in the moment someone just complimented your shirt (it brings out your eyes, you know, and have you lost a little weight?) and the moment when you spilled half a cup of scalding coffee on it?

Again, what’s true for you is true for any given agent, editor, or screener: a LOT of factors can play into whether they like the pages sitting in front of them — or the pitch they are hearing — right now.

Bear this in mind when you are incorporating feedback into your synopsis — or, indeed, any of your work. Just because one agent has given you feedback to tweak your story this way or that, it doesn’t necessarily mean that tweak will be greeted rapturously by everyone in the industry. Use your judgment: it’s your book, after all. But by all means, if you can modify your synopsis for eyes of the individual who expressed the particular opinion in question, do it with my blessings.

Tomorrow, on to prepping your submission pages. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

P.S.: If you live in the greater Seattle area — or live outside of it and just like long drives — why not attend the class I’m giving this coming Saturday on prepping your pitch for conference use? It’s free to PNWA members, and it will give you hands-on practice with people who have successfully pitched to agents in the past. How great is that? You can just drop in, but if you are fairly sure you would like to come, why not pre-register on the PNWA homepage, so we know how many chairs to set up?

Hello, readers —

Welcome to my series on how to prep a synopsis prior to the conference, so you do not end up running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off when the agent of your dreams asks you to produce one. As in instantly. I had thought I would be able to wrap up the series today, but as often happens, I found that I had even more wisdom swirling around in my head on the subject than I had previously thought.

Okay, let’s assume that you have completed a solid draft of your synopsis, and are now in the editing phase. Print it out, ensconce yourself in the most comfortable reading chair you can find, and read it over to yourself OUT LOUD.

Why out loud, and why in hard copy? As those of you who have been reading this blog for a long time already know, this is one of my most dearly-held editing rules. It is INFINITELY easier to catch logical leaps in any text when you read it out loud. It is practically the only way to catch the redundancies that the space constraints of a computer screen virtually guarantee will be in the text. Don’t even think of cheating and just reading it out loud from your computer screen, either: the eye reads screen text 75% faster than page text, so screen editing is inherently harder to do well. (And don’t think that publishing professionals are not aware of that: as an editor, I can tell you that a text that has not been read in hard copy by the author usually announces itself with absolute clarity.)

After you have read it through a couple of times, clearing out repeated words and ungraceful phrases, ask yourself the following questions. Be honest with yourself, or there is no point in the exercise; if you find that you are too close to the work to have sufficient perspective, ask someone you trust to read the synopsis, then ask THAT person these questions.

(1) Does my synopsis present actual scenes from the book in glowing detail, or does it merely summarize the plot?

You want the answer to be the former, of course. Long-time readers, chant it with me now: the synopsis is, in fact, a writing sample that you are presenting to an agent or editor, every bit as much as the first 50 pages are. Make sure it demonstrates clearly that you can write — not merely that you had the tenacity to sit down and write a book, because thousands of people do that, but that you have writing talent and sharp, clearly-delineated insights.

It is far, far easier to show off your writing in detailed summaries of actual scenes, rather than in a series of generalities about the plot and the characters. And if your favorite line of the book is not in the synopsis, why not?

(2) Does the story or argument make sense, as it is told in the synopsis? Is more information necessary?

There is another excellent reason to read the synopsis out loud: to make sure it stands alone as a story. Since part of the point of the synopsis is to demonstrate what a good storyteller you are, flow is obviously important. If you have even the tiniest reservations about whether you have achieved this goal, read your synopsis out loud to someone unfamiliar with your project — and then ask your listener to tell the basic story back to you. If there are holes in your account, this method will make them leap out at you. (Insofar as a hole can leap.)

(3) Is it compelling? Does it sound like other books on the market, or does it sound original? Does it make me eager to read the book?

When agencies specialize (and most of the best ones do), you would obviously expect that they would receive submissions within their areas of specialty, right? So it’s reasonable to expect that an agency screener at an agency that represents a lot of mysteries would not be reading synopses of SF books and NF books, and romances and westerns, mixed in with only a few mysteries — no, that screener is probably reading 800 mystery synopses per week.

This may seem self-evident, but think about it: it has practical ramifications. That screener is inundated with plots in the genre… and your synopsis is the 658th he’s read that week… so what is likely to happen if your synopsis makes your book sound too much like the others?

Right: next!

“Wait just a cotton-picking second!” I hear some of you out there cry, the ones who have attended conferences before. “I’ve heard agents and editors jabbering endlessly about how much they want to find books that are like this or that bestseller. They say they WANT books that are like others! So wouldn’t an original book stand LESS of a chance with these people?”

Ooh, good question — I was planning on holding off on this one until I started writing about pitching, but it is relevant here, too. Yes, you are quite right: any number of agents and editors will tell you that they want writers to replicate what is selling well now. Actually, though, this isn’t what they really mean. They really mean that they want you to have anticipated two years ago what would be selling well now, have tracked them down then, and convinced them (somehow) that your book was representative of a trend to come, and thus had your book on the market right now, making them money hand over fist.

Or, to put it in terms of the good joke that was making the rounds of agents a couple of years back: a writer of literary fiction reads THE DA VINCI CODE, doesn’t like it, and calls his agent in a huff. “It’s not very well written,” he complains. “Why, I could write a book that bad in a week.”

“Could you really?” The agent starts to pant with enthusiasm. “How soon could you get the manuscript to me?”

You can cater to this kind of logic if you like, but personally, I don’t think it’s worth your time to get mixed up in someone else’s success fantasy. Given how fast publishing fads fade, the same agent who was yammering at conference crowds last month about producing book X will be equally insistent next months that writers should write nothing but book Y. You simply cannot keep up with people who are purely reactive.

The fact is, carbon copies of successful books tend not to have legs; the reading public has a much greater eye for originality, apparently, than the publishing industry. What DOES sell quite well, and is a kind of description quite meaningful to agents, is the premise or elements of a popular work with original twists added. So you’re better off trying to pitch LITTLE WOMEN MEETS GODZILLA than LITTLE WOMEN itself, really.

And the synopsis is the ideal place to demonstrate how your book differs. Make sure it does not make your book sound generic.

All right, the rest of the questions follow tomorrow (you didn’t think you were going to get away with only three, did you?) If you are planning to attend the class I am giving on prepping your conference pitch, it’s THIS SATURDAY; please do pre-register on the PNWA homepage, so we know how many cookies to buy. And, again, if you are still trying to decide whom to rank first for your agent and editor choices for the conference, check out my archived blogs for April 26 — May 17 for the agents and May 18 — 26 for the editors.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Well, it’s a lovely, sunny day in the PNW (and for those of you who are not local: no, that’s not an oxymoron), and a young writer’s thoughts turn naturally to… landing an agent and selling one’s book, right? So for those of you who are planning to pitch a book at this summer’s PNWA conference (or at any other conference), why not hie ye hence to the PNWA’s homepage and sign up for my FREE Writing Connections class on prepping your pitch? It’s this coming Saturday, June 24th, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Also (and I know the repetition is a trifle annoying for my long-term readers, but this honestly is useful information to those visiting for the first time), if you are planning to attend this summer’s PNWA contest, check out my archived blogs for April 26 — May 26, to get the lowdown on the agents and editors who are scheduled to attend. It’s always better to make major decision — like, say, what agent to pick for your pitch session — based upon solid information, rather than guesswork. (If you don’t already know WHY it is better, read on.)

Today’s blog is what I devoutly hope will be the next-to-last last in my series on prepping your synopsis for conference use and/or submission. As I have been insisting for some days now, you will be SUBSTANTIALLY happier if you walk into the conference with your synopsis already polished, all ready to send out to the first agent or editor who asks for it, rather than running around in a fearful dither after the conference, trying to pull your submission packet together. Then, too, giving some serious thought to the overarching themes of your book is an excellent first step in pulling together a pitch.

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

Synopsis-writing is hard; budget adequate time for it.

If the task feels overwhelming — and terror is certainly understandable, faced with the daunting task of summarizing a 400-page book in just a few well-written pages — remind yourself that even though it may feel as though you effectively need to reproduce the entire book in condensed format, you actually don’t. You don’t need to depict every twist and turn of the plot — just strive to give a solid feel of the mood of the book and a basic plot summary. Show where the major conflicts lie, introduce the main characters, interspersed with a few scenes described with a wealth of sensual detail, to make it more readable.

Remember, too, that you should be shooting for 3 — 5 pages: no more, no less. If your draft persists in being less, and you are synopsizing a book-length work, chances are that you are not including the plot or argument in sufficient detail. So go back and reread it: is what you have hear honestly a reader-friendly telling of your story or a convincing presentation of your argument, or is it merely a presentation of the premise of the book and a cursory overview of its major themes? For most too-short synopses, it is the latter.

If you really get stuck about how to make it longer, print up a hard copy of the synopsis, find yourself a highlighting pen, and mark every summary statement about character, every time you have wrapped up a scene or plot twist description with a sentence along the lines of, “and in the process, Sheila learns an important lesson about herself.” Go back through and take a careful look at these highlighted lines: would a briefly-described scene SHOW the conclusion stated there better than just TELLING the reader about it? Is there a telling character detail or an interesting plot nuance that might supplement these general statements, making them more interesting to read?

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

If your synopsis has the opposite problem, and runs over 5 pages, you should also sit down and read it over with a highlighter gripped tightly in your warm little hand. On your first pass through, mark any sentence that does not deal with the primary plot of the book. Then go back through and read the UNMARKED sentences in sequence, ignoring the highlighted ones. Ask yourself honestly: does the shorter version give an accurate impression of the book?

If your synopsis still runs to long, try this trick of the pros: minimize the amount of space you devote to the book’s premise and the actions that occur in Chapter 1. Yes, you will need this information to appear prominently in a synopsis you would send with a cold query letter, but as I mentioned a few days ago, once you have been asked to submit pages, your synopsis has different goals.

Here’s a startling statistic: in the average novel synopsis, over a quarter of the text deals with premise and character introduction. Trim this down to just a few sentences and move on to the rest of the plot. If this seems dangerous to you, think about it: if the agent or editor asked to see Chapter 1 or the first 50 pages, and if you place the chapter BEFORE the synopsis in your submission packet, the reader will already be familiar with both the initial premise AND the basic characters AND what occurs at the beginning in the book. So why be repetitious?

Let me show you how it works (and yes, long-term readers, I have used this example before. But I’m using it slightly differently this time. So there.) Let’s say that you were Jane Austen, and you were pitching SENSE AND SENSIBILITY to an agent at a conference. (You should be so lucky!) The agent is, naturally, charmed by the story (because you were very clever indeed, and did enough solid research before you signed up for your agent appointment to have a pretty fair certainty that this particular agent is habitually charmed by this sort of story. See? Advance research really does pay off), and asks to see a synopsis and the first 50 pages.

At that very moment, you have on your computer your query synopsis. In it, the summary of the first 50 pp. worth of action look something like this:

“ELINOR (19) and MARIANNE DASHWOOD (17) are in a pitiable position: due to the whimsical will of their great-uncle, the family estate passes at the death of their wealthy father into the hands of their greedy half-brother, JOHN DASHWOOD (early 30s). Their affectionate but impractical mother (MRS. DASHWOOD, 40), soon offended at John’s wife’s (FANNY FERRARS DASHWOOD, late 20s) domineering ways and lack of true hospitality, wishes to move her daughters from Norland, the only home they have ever known, but comparative poverty and the fact that Elinor is rapidly falling in love with her sister-in-law’s brother, EDWARD FERRARS (mid-20s), render any decision on where to go beyond the reach of her highly romantic speculations. Yet when John and his wife talk themselves out of providing any financial assistance to the female Dashwoods at all, Mrs. Dashwood accepts the offer of her cousin, SIR JOHN MIDDLETON (middle aged) to move her family to Barton Park, hundreds of miles away. Once settled there, the Dashwoods find themselves rushed into an almost daily intimacy with Sir John and his wife, LADY MIDDLETON (late 20s) at the great house. There, they meet COLONEL BRANDON (early 40s), Sir John’s melancholy friend, who seems struck by Marianne’s musical ability — and beauty. But does his sad face conceal a secret?

“However, Marianne”s heart is soon engaged elsewhere: she literally falls into love. Dashing and romantic WILLOUGHBY (26) happens to be riding by when Marianne tumbles down a hillside, spraining her ankle. Just like the romantic hero of her dreams, he sweeps her up and carries her to safety. Soon, the pair are inseparable, agreeing in every particular: in music, in poetry, in the proper response to life, which is to ignore propriety in favor of expressing unrestrained feeling. When Col. Brandon is abruptly obliged to cancel a party in order to rush off to London to attend to mysterious business, the lovers are perfectly agreed that stuffy old Brandon made up the urgency in order to spoil their pleasure.

“All too quickly, however, it is Willoughby’s turn to be called away by mysterious duties elsewhere, leaving a weeping Marianne courting every memory of their happy days together while Elinor wonders why the pair have not announced their evident engagement.

“Edward comes to visit the Dashwoods, but he is sadly changed, morose and apparently afraid to be left alone with Elinor, despite Marianne’s continual and well-meaning efforts to allow the lovebirds solitude in which to coo. Edward is wearing an unexplained ring, human hair set in metal: he claims it is his sister Fanny’s but the Dashwoods are sure it is Elinor’s.”

Now, all of this does in fact occur in the first 50 pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, at least in my little paperback addition. However, all of the plot shown above would be in the requested first 50, right? So, being a wise Aunt Jane, you would streamline your submission synopsis so it looked a bit more like this:
“At the death of their wealthy father, ELINOR (19) and MARIANNE DASHWOOD (17) and their affectionate but impractical mother (MRS. DASHWOOD, 40) are forced to leave their life-long home and move halfway across England, to live near relatives they have never seen, far away from Elinor’s beloved EDWARD FERRARS (mid-20s). At the home of their cousins SIR JOHN (late 30s) and LADY MIDDLETON (late 20s), melancholy COLONEL BRANDON (early 40s), seems struck by Marianne;s musical ability — and beauty. But does his sad face conceal a secret?

“Dashing WILLOUGHBY (26) happens to be riding by when Marianne tumbles down a hillside, spraining her ankle. Just like the romantic hero of her dreams, he sweeps her up and carries her to safety. Soon, the pair are inseparable, much to Col. Brandon’s chagrin. He rushes off to London to attend to mysterious business. All too quickly, however, Willoughby is called away, too. Marianne spends her days courting every tender memory of him, while Elinor wonders why the pair have not announced their evident engagement.

“Elinor’s love life is less successful: when Edward comes to visit, he seems afraid to be left alone with her, despite Marianne’s continual and well-meaning efforts to allow the lovebirds solitude in which to coo. Does his silence mean he no longer loves Elinor?”

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

Tomorrow, if the publishing gods are with us, I shall wrap up the synopsis, so we can move on to other conference-related matters. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Welcome back to my ongoing series on how to craft an attention-grabbing synopsis BEFORE the conference, so you will not be thrown into forty-seven kinds of panic the instant an agent or editor asks you to send one. If you’re looking for information on how to register for said conference, don’t look here — check out the PNWA homepage, which will give you the skinny on how to sign up. But before you do, why not read some helpful background on the agents and editors with whom you can request appointments? Detailed low-down in my archived blogs of (longtime readers, chant it with me now) April 26 — May 17 for the agents and May 18 — 26 for the editors.

I went on (and on and on) yesterday about the importance of a novel synopsis’ demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that its writer is a gifted storyteller. For nonfiction, the task is a trifle more complicated. And lest you think I am speaking out of my area of expertise here, I should tell you: I have a LOT of experience writing and editing both. My memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK is due out sometime this year (the author is always the last to know such trivialities as release dates; all I can currently tell you for sure is that it is already available for presale on Amazon), and my agent has just sent out my first novel, THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB, to make the rounds of agents. Not to mention all of the synopses I see as a frequent contest judge and even more frequent freelance editor.

So yours truly has spent quite a bit of time in the last few years hunkered over the odd synopsis, let me tell you. I know whereat I speak. To get a sense of the authority with which I speak, kindly imagine the following words of wisdom booming from the mouth of Oz, the Great and Terrible.

In a NF synopsis, your goal is threefold: to give the argument of the book in some detail, along with some indication of how you intend to prove your case; to demonstrate that the book will appeal to a large enough market niche to make publishing it worthwhile, and to show beyond any reasonable question that you are the best-qualified person in the universe to write the book.

In 3-5 pages. I’m not entirely sure that I proved half that much in my master’s thesis.

The argument is the most important element here — in the synopsis you should not only show the content of the argument, but also that you can argue coherently. Yes, yes, I know: this seems counterintuitive. Wouldn’t the best way for an agent to check out your argumentative style be to, you know, read the book?

Let’s all take a mental holiday, shall we, and picture how much easier all of our lives would be people in the publishing industry actually thought that way? Ah, that’s nice: a world where writers’ talent was judged solely by thoughtful, prose-loving agents and editors, lounging on comfy sofas in sun-drenched lofts, languidly turning over page after page of entire manuscripts sent to them by aspiring authors. And look, outside that massive loft window — do I see a pig flying by, with Jimmy Stewart on his back?

Okay, back to the real world: your synopsis will have perhaps two minutes under an agent’s (or, more likely, an agency screener’s) bloodshot, overworked eyes. This isn’t a lot of time to establish an argument much more complicated than the recipe for your sainted mother’s cream of tomato soup, right? Even if your mother’s recipe consists primarily of opening a can of Campbell’s.

It is enough time, though, to demonstrate that you can make an argument where each sentence leads logically to the next. Think of it as a tap-dancing audition, your two-minute chance to show your fancy footwork: if you argue well enough here, the agent will ask to see the argument in the book.

If I seem to be harping on the necessity of making a COMPLETE, if skeletal, argument here, it is because the single most common mistake NF synopsizers make is to give only PART of the argument, or still worse, only the premise. Instead, they use the space to go on a rant about how necessary the book is, essentially squandering precious argumentative space with marketing jargon and premise.

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

Don’t forget to mention what kind of evidence you will be using to support your claims. Have you done extensive research? Exhaustive interviews? Hung out with the right people? If you have a professional with the subject that makes you an expert, or personal experience that gives you a unique insight into the subject, try to mention that in your opening paragraph, or at least in the second. Otherwise, stick to the subject matter, and explain what the book is going to teach people about it.

I use the term teach advisedly, because it is often quite helpful for synopsis writers to think of the task as producing a course overview for the lesson that is the book’s content. How will this book help readers, and what kind of readers will it help? Obviously, a good professor would not try to cram an entire semester’s worth of material into the first lecture, right? Neither would a good NF synopsizer. Instead, both outline their work in general, try to convince their audiences that it is worthwhile to sign up for the class or buy the book in order to learn more about the topic.

Your first task, then: to make your subject matter sound absolutely fascinating. To achieve this successfully, you will need to show how your take on it is original — and to do that, you are going to have to spell out your argument. (Have I convinced you yet that that you really do need to present a cohesive theory here? And did I mention the importance of its being cohesive?)

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

Don’t get so caught up in the argument that you do not include a BRIEF explanation of why the world needs your book, and why you are the best person imaginable to write it, the second and third goals on our list. If you are writing on a subject that has already been well-trodden by past authors, this is even more important. Make it plain why your book is different and better.

There is no need to be heavy-handed in your own praise to achieve this, either. To prove it to you, I’m going to give you a sample opening, modest enough that it would strike no one as overbearing. Read carefully, as there will be a pop quiz afterward to see if you can spot the ways that this brief paragraph achieves Goals #2 and #3:

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

How did you do? Give yourself points if you noticed that the opening question grabbed the reader, showing immediately how this book might relate to the reader’s practical life; a rhetorical question for which the book itself provides an answer is a great way to establish a book’s appeal at the very beginning of the synopsis. Also, pat yourself on the back fifty times if you zeroed in on the subtle way in which this paragraph dissed the competition — the implication here is that the authors all previous books on the subject were such boneheads that THEY thought mountains were just collections of rocks. No one is naming names here, but those authors know who they are.

Still more points if you noted the clever (if I do say so myself) use of demographic information. If you have statistics on your prospective market, this is the place to mention them — here, and in your query letter, and in your pitch. As in:

“There are currently 2 million Americans diagnosed with agoraphobia, yet there are few self-help books out there for them — and only one that is actually written by an agoraphobic, someone who truly understands what it feels like to be shut in by fear.”

Why is it so important to hammer home the statistics in every conceivable forum? Well, no matter how large the prospective market for your book is (unless it is an already well-covered market, such as golf fans), you can’t ever, ever assume that an agent or editor will be aware of its size. ALWAYS assume that they will underestimate it — and thus the market appeal of your book.

(This is particularly true if you are pitching a book about anything that ever occurred west of, say, Albany to a NYC-based agent or editor, or any story set north of Santa Barbara or east of Los Vegas to an LA-based one. The news media are not the only folks who think that nothing that happens to anyone outside of their own city limits is worth reporting, alas. Regional prejudices still run strong enough that you might actually find yourself explaining to a charming, urbane agent with an MA in American Literature from Columbia or a law degree from Yale that yes, the inhabitants of Boise CAN support a symphony, and have for many years. And schools. And indoor plumbing.)

Back to our example. Bonus points if you noticed the sneaky way MOUTAINS MY WAY established the author’s status as an expert. If “Why are you the best person to write this book?” seems secondary to the subject matter, you probably haven’t pitched a NF book lately. Just so you know, it’s the first question almost anyone in the industry will ask after you mention casually that you are writing a NF book. “So,” they’ll say, reserving comment about the marketability of your topic until after they hear the answer to this particular question, “what’s your platform?”

Platform is industry-speak for the background that qualifies you to write the book — and unless you write in a technical, scientific, or medical field, it generally has less to do with your educational credentials than your life experience. In the case of my memoir, for example, my Ph.D. did not even gain a reference in my platform: what was important, for the purposes of establishing my familiarity with the subject, was that from when I was 8 until I was 15, the world’s most famous SF writer (although he was not so well-known at the time), who happened to be my mother’s ex-husband, used to call me on a regular basis to chat about life in general and what whoppers he could tell the reporters coming to interview him in particular. Far from my schooling establishing my expertise, my platform for this memoir had been magnificently erected long before I graduated from high school.

I’m going to be brutally honest with you here: very few writing teachers will advise you to include your platform in your synopsis, even for a NF book. That’s material for the author bio, they will tell you. Most of the time, writers include a background paragraph in their query letters, but personally, I think it makes a whole lot of sense to give a quick nod to the platform in the synopsis as well, if it makes your work sound more credible. Go ahead and state your qualifications, but keep it brief, and make it clear how those qualifications, well, qualify you to write this book.

They’re not going to know if you don’t tell them, I always say.

If your head is whirling from all of this, or if it’s starting to sound as though your synopsis will need to be longer than the book in order to achieve its goals, don’t worry. Tomorrow, I shall cover some tips on how to simplify the synopsis process, as well as how to slim it down if it becomes overlong. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Happy Flag Day, everybody! I’m not quite sure why flags NEED their own day, any more than, say, pandas do, but say what you like about the flag flying over the U.S. capitol, it’s certainly colorful. Festive, even, and perhaps that in itself deserves a commemorative day. Although why the fine folks who work in said capitol would have picked Che Guevara’s birthday to commemorate the U.S.A.’s flag is beyond me.

Speaking capitols and capitals, I’ve realized that I left a rather important piece of advice out of yesterday’s post on writing a synopsis. It’s not absolutely necessary, technically speaking, but most professional fiction synopses CAPITALIZE THE ENTIRE NAME of each major character the first time it appears. It is also considered pretty darned nifty (and word-count thrifty) to include the character’s age in parentheses immediately after the first time the name appears, resulting in synopses that read something like this:

“ST. THERESA OF AVILA (26) has a problem. Ever since she started dating multi-millionaire GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER (82), all of her friends have unaccountably decided that she is mercenary and hates Native Americans. Apart from JEANNE D’ARC (30), her wacky landlady-cum-bowling-partner, who uses every opportunity to pump Theresa for man-landing tips, none of the residents of Theresa’s swanky Upper East Side co-op are even speaking to her — at least until they start desperately vying for invitations to her exclusive wedding extravaganza, a lavish event to be held onstage at the Oscars, with THE REVEREND DOCTOR OWEN WILSON (42 if he’s a day, I would guess, but his press agent probably slashes at least eight years off that for the press’ benefit) officiating. How will Theresa find a maid of honor — and if she does, what will her jealous old boyfriend GOD (∞) do?”

Should any of you out there think you’re up to rounding out the plot above into some measure of coherence, please, be my guest. Really. It’s my Flag Day present to you.

For the rest of you, please note what I have done here: in preparing a synopsis for a comedy, I have produced a — wait for it! — humorous treatment of the material. And if I were creating a synopsis for a steamy romance novel with the same premise (although I tremble to think what a sex romp with that particular cast of characters would entail), you can bet your last wooden nickel that I would take some writerly steps to make my reader’s mouth go dry and his breath become short while perusing it.

Would I do this because I’m wacky? No, because — and brace yourself, because I’m about to divulge some serious words of wisdom here — the synopsis, like the first 50 pages, is a writing sample. The sensible writer’s primary goal in producing it is to demonstrate not only that it is a good (or at least marketable) story, an attention-grabbing yarn peopled with fascinating characters, but that the writer is a great storyteller.

Yes, yes, I hear you grumbling: from the POV of a novelist, 3 — 5 pages is hardly enough space to tell the story of a stoplight going from green to red with much panache. But you know something? Agents and editors think so highly of writers that they expect you to do it anyway.

Bless them for their optimism, eh? You’d think, after reading hundreds of these things per week, that their faith would waver a bit, but no. Even the most hardened publishing type retains a belief in the possibility of the perfectly entertaining synopsis so intense that it makes the average 6-year-old’s belief in Santa Claus seem like Voltaire-ish skepticism. And that is pretty darned impressive, considering that all too often, writers just state the premise of the novel in a synopsis, rather than taking the reader through the plot, blow by blow — and that can be mind-bogglingly boring.

“But Anne!” I hear you cry, and who could blame you? “My book is about a love affair between a bomb-defusing stockbroker who moonlights as a cat burglar and a former Miss America who now sits on the UN Security Council when she’s not designing speedboats or skeet shooting. How boring could a straightforward summary of THAT premise possibly be?

Oh, honeys, you would be surprised.

I read a LOT of synopses each year, and let me tell you, through sheer repetition, the plots of even the raciest potboilers can start sounding awfully similar after awhile. And the average agent reads as many of them in a day as I do in six months. Under such an assault of plotting, even if the reader is armed with the best possible intentions and the greatest conceivable love of literature to begin with, the eyes begin to glaze, passing indifferently over massacres and heretofore-unknown sex acts alike.

So how, given that your synopsis is inevitably going to be read in the midst of an avalanche of others with similar claims to a reader’s attention, can you make yours stand out? As any great storyteller can tell you (and will, at the slightest provocation), keeping the audience’s attention is largely dependent upon the storyteller’s skill in juggling a number of factors: pacing, character development, and detail, to name but a few. A storyteller who cannot surprise her audience from time to time is probably going to end up boring them, at least a little.

Work on cultivating the element of surprise. If the plot has twists and turns, so should the synopsis. Show the story arc, but do not merely summarize the plot as quickly as possible (as — sacre bleu! — most of the synopses any agent receives will). Try to give the feel of a number of specific scenes. Don’t be afraid to use forceful imagery and strong sensual detail, and try to make the tone of the synopsis echo the tone of the book.

Yes, yes, I know: it’s a tall order. But don’t forget that the synopsis is every bit as much an indication of your writing skill as the actual chapters that you are submitting. And don’t you want YOURS to be the one that justified the agent’s heavily-tried faith that SOMEBODY out there can tell a good story in 3 — 5 pages? The truly entertaining synopsis may be as hard to spot in the wild as the giant panda, but by golly, that’s what these agents and editors have set out to hunt.

More practical advice on the same subject follows tomorrow, of course. Hey, if you haven’t already done it, why not register for my Prepping Your Pitch class on June 24th? Check out the PNWA’s homepage for details.

And those of you who have not yet registered for the conference in July, please feel free to consult my rundown on the attending agents and editors who are available for pitching appointments. Those posts are in the archives, April 26 — May 26. (Wow, I hadn’t realized I spent a month of my life tracking down that information. No wonder it seemed like a never-ending task; by the end of it, I was having dreams about having high tea in Manhattan with Lauren Abramo, Jeff Kleinman, and a clouded leopard, with D.H. Lawrence bringing us crumpets and marmalade jam.)

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

A little bit of housekeeping before I launch into my promised nuts-and-bolts speech about synopses. First, many thanks to all of you who have been writing in to me here at the blog — it really is useful for me to know what pieces of advice you have found especially helpful. An especial round of thanks to those blog readers who let me know that their entries made it to the finalist round in the PNWA contest! Congratulations! (And if you haven’t already let me know, please do. I enjoy the vicarious thrill.)

If you do write in, for whatever reason, please do be aware that if you do not include your e-mail address in the body of your message, I cannot write back to you. Matter of policy. So if you are asking a very specific question, please do give me the means to respond directly.

Last housekeeping detail: yes, I know those of you who have already registered for this summer’s PNWA contest are probably sick of hearing about it, but for those of you who have not yet made your choices for agent and editor appointments, check out my series of posts detailing these fine people’s accomplishments: April 26 — May 17 for the agents and May 18 — 26 for the editors.

All right, on to today’s topic, crafting a stellar synopsis of your book. (And don’t worry, those of you who missed yesterday’s post: I SHALL be writing a LOT on pitching between now and the conference. However, since literally every writer in the world who deals with either an agent or an editor will need to produce a synopsis at some point — and that point is often immediately following meeting same at a literary conference — I want to drop some words of wisdom on synopsis-writing first.) Let me define synopsis, for those of you new to the term:

Synopsis: A brief exposition IN THE PRESENT TENSE of the plot of a novel or the argument of a book. Typically, synopses run from 3-5 pages (double-spaced, with 1-inch margins, in Times, Times New Roman, or Courier typefaces, the standards for the industry), depending upon the requirements of the requesting agent or editor.

When in doubt, stick to 3 or 4. Think about that. 4 pages in standard format is roughly 1000 words, enough space to give some fairly intense detail. By contrast, a jacket blurb is usually between 100 and 250 words, only enough to give a general impression or set up a premise.

I point this out, because far too many writers new to the biz submit jacket blurbs to agents, editors, and contests, rather than synopses: marketing puff pieces, rather than plot descriptions or argument outlines. This is a mistake. Publishing houses have marketing departments for producing advertising copy. In a synopsis from a heretofore-unpublished writer, what industry professionals want to see is not self-praise, or a claim that every left-handed teenage boy in North America will be drawn to this book (even it it’s true), but a summary of what the book is ABOUT.

Since the jacket blurb synopsis is such a common mistake, most agencies use it as an easy excuse to reject a submission unread. Yes, it’s unfair (as I mentioned yesterday, I do not run the universe, or nicer rules would prevail for writers), but the industry logic runs thus: a writer who doesn’t know the difference between a blurb and a synopsis is probably unfamiliar with other industry norms, such as standard format and turn-around times. Thus (they reason), it’s more efficient to throw that fish back, to wait until it grows, before they invest serious amounts of time in frying it. With such good bait, they really don’t stay up nights worrying about the fish that got away. They know you’ll come swimming back.

I apologize from the bottom of my heart for that analogy; it’s certainly unkind to describe any dedicated writer’s work that way. However, I have been listening to agents and editors talk about submissions for many years now, and I do believe the fish metaphor is, alas, a pretty accurate representation of most of the non-creative side of the industry’s attitudes. Ugly, isn’t it?

Because it’s so easy for a too-long or too-short synopsis to be dismissed, you should NEVER allow a synopsis to run over 5 pages or under 2. Since 3-4 pages is industry standard, a synopsis that is much shorter will make you look as if you are unable to sustain a longer exposition; if it is much longer, you will look as though you aren’t aware of the standard. Either way, the results can be fatal to your submission.

So what DOES work in a synopsis? It’s not going to sound sexy, I’m afraid, but here is the secret: for fiction, stick to the plot of the novel, include enough vivid detail to make the synopsis interesting to read, and make sure the writing is impeccable.

For nonfiction, begin with a single paragraph about (a) why there is a solid market already available for this book and (b) why your background/research/approach renders you the perfect person to fill that market niche. Then present the book’s argument in a straightforward manner, showing how each chapter will build upon the one before to prove your case as a whole. Give some indication of what evidence you will use to back up your points.

And that’s it. I know — it sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

Whatever you do, if you are writing a synopsis for a novel, avoid the temptation to turn the synopsis into either a self-praise session (“My writing teacher says this is the best comic novel since CATCH-22!”) or an exposition on why you chose to write the book. These asides are often deal-breakers for agency screeners.

Why? Because they are both SO common. If I had a dime for every novel synopsis or query I’ve seen that included the phrase, “it isn’t autobiographical, but…” I would own my own island in the Caribbean. (And if I had a dime for every time I’ve heard it in a pitch, I’d just buy the five major North American publishing houses outright.) When you’re reading 800 submissions per week, commonalities can get pretty darn annoying. At minimum, they can make the synopses that contain them all start to blur together.

Trust me, however true it may be, it comes across as a cliché, and besides, a good fiction synopsis is NOT a justification for having written the book in the first place: properly, it is one hell of a good story, presented well. Period.

For nonfiction, you will want to do some gentle self-promotion, to give an indication of why your book is uniquely marketable and you are the most reasonable person in the universe to write it (platform, platform, platform!) but again, try not to get sidetracked on WHY you chose to write it. A LOT of NF synopses go off on these tangents, to their own detriment. Given a choice, use the space to flesh out your argument.

In fact, there are very few contexts in the publishing world where launching on a lengthy disquisition why you wrote the book is even appropriate. First, within a nonfiction book proposal, it is sometimes a necessary component to making the argument that you are uniquely qualified to write the book you are proposing, to establish your platform. Second, within the context of an interview AFTER the book is released, writers are free to ramble on about it as long as they like. Interviewers LOVE hearing about writers’ motivations — which, I suspect is why aspiring writers so often want to tell everyone they see what is and is not autobiographical in their novels; we’ve all seen it in a million literary interviews. Third — and here is where talking about it will help you most in your professional progress — when you are chatting with other writers, or if you become very, very good friends with your agent or editor after the contract is signed.

I know it’s hard to accept, but actually, in a business sense, why you wrote the book is not very important to the industry. In their eyes, unless you are a celebrity cashing in on your name recognition, you wrote your book for one very simple reason: because you are a writer. From that rather cold (and, I have to say, not very imaginative) POV, a writer who goes on and on about the psychological impulses to tell a particular story (unless the book in question is a memoir) comes across as not very professional.

I hate this, because in my experience, most aspiring writers tend to blurt out their reasons for penning a book primarily because they are so isolated during the writing process. It is a positive relief to be able to talk about it to someone, isn’t it, especially when that someone is empowered to get the book published at long last? It’s natural, it’s understandable, and it’s probably even healthy. Go with that impulse.

But please, please take my word on this one: you should not do it in the presence of anyone employed in the publishing industry until after a contract is signed, unless you are responding to a direct question from an agent or editor, because publishing types tend to regard it as a sign of writerly inexperience, a symptom of unprofessionalism.

In other words: back into the pond, fish.

It’s a great idea to get your blurting out of your system BEFORE you walk into your pitch meetings. Vent to your kith and kin. Gather together a group of writing friends before the conference and have a vast personal revelation session. Make friends with the writers in the hallways of the conference. Come and see me at the pitch-practicing booth at PNWA. But do not, under ANY circumstances, either use your synopsis or your pitch meeting for personal revelations not integrally related to the content of the book.

Again, there are a couple of exceptions; obviously, if the agent of your dreams asks, “So, where did you get the idea for this book,” you may give an honest answer. Also, if you have some very specific expertise that renders your take on a subject particularly valid, feel free to mention it in your pitch or query letter — in fiction, that information does not really belong in the synopsis. If you are writing a novel, and you feel that you have an inside perspective that simply must be mentioned here, stick it at the end, where it won’t be too intrusive.

See? Working on your synopsis before the conference really does have fringe benefits: it helps you gain a gut feeling for what is and isn’t appropriate to mention when discussing your book. And that, my friends, is an instinct that will serve you well anywhere you go within the publishing industry.

More tips on synopsis building follow tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

P.S. to my correspondent in India: that’s a rather broad question; I would need more information about your book in order to answer it. In a sense, everything I have written in this blog has been advice on how to get books published. (You might want to read through the archives, especially for August and September, 2005, which would be most helpful for a writer of literary fiction.)

Hello, readers —

Did you miss me over the last couple of days? Technically, I am still on retreat — I’m trying to finish a novel; I’ve lost oodles of writing time over the last year to a series of groundless lawsuit threats against my memoir, so I’m doubling up on my weekly writing quotas this summer, to try to catch up — but as I mentioned in my last post, writers’ vacations tend to be working ones. So do editors’ — and if it makes you feel any better, I know a tremendous number of agents who spend their Saturdays and airplane trips home to visit parents plowing through manuscripts. This is just not a 9-to-5 business.

Thus it came about that while I am on retreat, I have also been reading submissions for a literary contest for which I am a judge. For those of you whose heart rates just shot up: no, it was NOT for PNWA. The finalists for this year’s PNWA contest have already been decided, and the happy few will be notified by June 15th. Those whose entries did not make it to the finalist round will receive their two sets of feedback AFTER the July conference. (Hey, it’s a volunteer-run organization; pulling together a contest AND a conference is very time-consuming.)

So I have been reading a WHOLE lot of first chapters and synopses this week — the typical contest-entry mixed bag. (Once again, I implore you: if you EVER enter a literary contest, make SURE your submission is in standard format! Deviations from standard format result in far more good entries being knocked out of competitive running than almost any other single criterion. That, and not adhering to contest rules.) I couldn’t help but notice that the fashion in synopses is running toward brevity this year — a fact I thought deserved comment, because until a couple of years ago, the fad ran in the opposite direction, toward over-long synopses.

Are you surprised that synopses, much like contest entries and submissions to agents, exhibit trends over time? Don’t be. Just as agents’ and editors’ tastes undergo wild fluctuations — anybody try to sell a historical novel to a mainstream agent in the year or two before COLD MOUNTAIN came out? Couldn’t give ’em away. — so do writers’. Partially, this is a reflection of the prevailing wisdom on the writers’ conference circuit, as well as in publications aimed at writers, which too run in fads.

All of this is fine, and to be expected. Since one of the biggest conference and class trends of the last five years has been screenwriters sharing their plotting tips with aspiring novelists, it was predictable that synopses would start getting shorter. In the movie-making world, the single-page plot synopsis is the norm.

However, I think the trend toward super-short synopses is not particularly helpful to the writer of books. For agents, yes, I do see some benefit: the shorter the synopsis, the less time required to review it. But since three- to five-page synopses are standard in the book publishing world, you should ask yourself: does a one- or two-page synopsis really impress the people you need to impress in order to get your book published?

Usually, no — and here again, we encounter another secret handshake of the publishing world. Most query screeners at most major agencies are trained to reject any submission that does not adhere to industry norms. So when an agency that represents novels receives a query with a one-page synopsis attached, will the too-short synopsis raise a red flag? It’s been known to happen, alas.

However, when asked about this phenomenon, most agency screeners will not state outright that if synopsis is not a certain length, they will conclude that the writer is not familiar with professional standards. Instead, they tend to report drawing an even more significant conclusion: if the synopsis is too short, they say, they assume that the author has not yet finished writing the book.

The logic behind this is rather abstruse, so stick with me here. A professional synopsis is NOT just a summary of the plot of the book, or even its major themes: it should include a few scenes recounted in a fair amount of detail, to give a representative taste of the flavor of the writing in the book. (Don’t worry, if this is news to you; I shall return to this topic in a future posting.) With few exceptions, a super-short synopsis will not include any individual scenes at all. Since few writers are reticent in describing (in print, anyway) the glories of their own plots, why would a writer NOT include descriptions of the best scenes in the synopsis, since the synopsis is first and foremost a sales document?

I think I can tell the screeners why: many writers confuse the synopsis with the jacket blurb, which also usually includes some summary of the plot. The jacket blurb does tend to be, in fact, about 250 words: in other words, a one-page synopsis.

Now, I am of the opinion that virtually no aspiring writer would confuse the two on purpose, but then, I am not an agent who reads 800 submissions per week, so I am inclined to be charitable. Agency screeners usually are not. Thus the common conclusion: if the synopsis is very short, or insufficiently detailed, they assume that the writer simply hasn’t finished WRITING the book yet. They assume, in short, that the reason the detail isn’t there is that it does not yet exist in the book.

And why is this conclusion a problem for the querying writer? Chant it with me now: because fiction agents do not represent unfinished novels. When confronted with an unfinished manuscript written by a previously unpublished writer (someone other than a celebrity, that is), virtually any agency’s screener will move it from the consider-me pile into the reject pile so fast that it will hardly touch the desk.

In other words: NEXT!

Yes, yes, I agree: this conclusion is unfair. However, in a sense, I can see the screeners’ point. The jacket blurb is marketing material, aimed at the general public; the synopsis is aimed at those who screen books for a living. Think about it from the agent’s POV: if you read 50 synopses for, say, murder mysteries in any given day, wouldn’t the plots all start to run together in your mind if NONE of the synopses included significant detail?

If you have been sending out very-short synopses with your query letters, DON’T PANIC. If you have been receiving form-letter rejections, you might want to consider the possibility that your submissions have been rejected unread, simply because your synopsis was too short. (Hey, I don’t make the rules: I’m just the messenger here.) It might well be worth your while to construct a longer, more detailed synopsis — then query your top agent picks again. Perhaps not the ones who rejected you in May, but certainly the ones who rejected you in March.

Don’t worry about the repetition bugging them, if it is a large agency: they receive far too many queries in a given month to remember (or catalog) them all. (I wouldn’t suggest mentioning in the query letter that you had queried them before, however.) And if they do remember yours from before, they will probably merely conclude that in the interim, you finished writing the book — thus the fuller synopsis.

Hey, sometimes, the industry’s cynicism works for you, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Since some of you who will be meeting with agents and editors at the PNWA conference (or other conferences) this summer will undoubtedly be asked to submit a synopsis with your post-conference submissions, I am going to revisit the issue of how to write a killer synopsis. But not right now — because, appearances to the contrary, I am on retreat! Watch this space, though.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Min

Hello, readers —

Ah, the bohemian life of the writer: we never really get vacations, do we? Or, to be precise, our definition of a really fabulous vacation tends to be a few days off in the middle of nowhere, where we can shut ourselves off from outside stimuli and write. Preferably with room service.

This is actually a working vacation for me, but with the conference so close, I thought I should post, anyway. The very fact that the term “working vacation” has made its way into our collective vocabulary makes me wonder about how much the computer has actually improved our lives. It used to be that when you traveled for business, you got to read a book on the plane — now, you work on your laptop instead. One of the charms of being on vacation used to be that you were NOT reachable by phone, but we now regularly hear cell phones ringing on beaches. It makes one think.

I am allowing myself a certain leeway of topic, though, to mark the casualness of the occasion. So, in keeping with the summer vacation spirit, where everyone’s knees are visible in Bermuda shorts, I’m going to tackle a fun topic today: what you should wear to a conference in the dead middle of summer.

Several of you have written in, asking about what to wear to your meetings with agents and editors at the upcoming PNWA conference. (And, if you have not already had a chance to register, remember: registration forms postmarked by TOMORROW will mean $50 off the price of admission!) It’s an excellent question, because in many ways, these meetings are job interviews — you want to look professional, not as though you have just stepped off the aforementioned beach.

Does this mean you should wear a suit? No, not unless you will be pitching a book about business skills, or another sort of NF book where your credibility as an expert is a strong element of your platform. If not, overdressing can come across as insecurity, rather than professionalism, especially to a NYC-based agent or editor.

Why? Well, just as being naturally good-looking makes a BIG difference in first impressions on this coast (come on, admit it), being well and appropriately dressed is important in making good first impressions on Manhattanites. Seriously, one way that people identify others like themselves back East is by dress — if you work at a fashion magazine, you dress one way; if you work in a brokerage firm, you dress another. So to an NYC-based agent, if you wear a suit, depending on the designer’s label within, you might to an observer be identified as a high-powered attorney, a minor official at a state agency, or a shoe salesman.

So while this means that you might as well skip the makeup and wear your glasses to your meeting (because that’s what writers look like normally, right?), this is not the time to be shabby. Neatness counts. Nice pants or a skirt (but not a super-short one, unless you are pitching erotica), avoid showing too much cleavage or chest hair, and go light on the cologne. Unless you are pitching a book about mountaineering, I would avoid jeans or hiking boots. No need for women to wear heels or nylons, though. Don’t dress up as if you were attending an afternoon wedding — a corsage would be a BIT much — but don’t show up in shorts and a T-shirt, either.

I am about to make a prophecy: you will remember this advice vividly when you walk into the conference, because there you will see many, many people there in jeans and T-shirts proclaiming their favorite bands or 5K runs for charity. The PNW is a pretty casual place. Do as I say, not as they do, because even if EVERYONE else is dressed down, you will still make a better impression if you are appropriately dressed than if you are not.

Basically, wear what you might to the first major reading of your book in a bookstore.

This is a terrific rule of thumb anytime you will be meeting with anyone in the industry, actually, because you will be demonstrating to an agent who is considering taking you on as a client, or an editor who is considering your book, that you have enough social sensitivity that they don’t have to worry about you showing up to future interviews or signings in your pajamas.

Believe it or not, the ability to dress appropriately is equally helpful whether you write gardening advice or cyberpunk. People in the industry want to work with authors whom they can send into a variety of promotional environments — if you doubt this, pay attention to what the presenting writers, agents, and editors will be wearing. You’re not going to see a while lot of prints on the women, for instance; I’ve never been to a writers’ conference where at least one of the publishing professionals WASN’T wearing a plain, clean-lined pantsuit.

So this is not the best place to trot out the big floral prints (you’ll think about that, too, when you see how many people show up in them), or clothing bearing the insignia of a business or sports team. I don’t want to see your knees at all, under any circumstances, so even though it will be July, just don’t pack the shorts or flip-flops with your conference gear. Trust me on this one. (The meeting rooms will be air-conditioned, anyway, sometimes to pneumonia-inducing levels of chill.)

I hear some of you out there grumbling, and rightly so: for most of the conference, you will be sitting around on folding chairs, listening to speakers. So wouldn’t it make MORE sense to wear something comfortable, rather than fussy nice clothes?

In a word, yes — to the parts of the conference where you can reasonably expect to be sitting around on a folding chair, listening to speakers. But for your meetings, no. There’s no law, however, that says you can’t leave your nicely-pressed shirt on a hanger in your car, or in the closet of your hotel room, to change into an hour before your appointment, is there?

Two caveats about the preceding. First, if you plan on taking the brave route of accosting agents to pitch at them in the hallways, do plan on being dressed up a bit the whole time, so you are always ready to make a good impression.

Second — and this may seem a trifle frivolous, but it is nevertheless true — the lighting in virtually every conference center in North America makes everyone look ghastly. Red tones tend to do better in that light than yellows. And if you’re like me, and pale, you might want to spring for a little rouge or lipstick, so you don’t look as though you have spent the last year typing away on your opus in a crypt. (Unless, of course, you write about vampires, in which case you may feel free to look a trifle Goth.)

Speaking of which, I now notice that the sky outside is a glorious Copen blue, and I should go outside. Happy June!

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Yesterday, I was talking about what really happens (as opposed to the pervasive fantasy about what happens) if an agent falls in love with your book at a conference. (For an explanation of what an editor from a major publishing house does in the same situation, see my post for May 22nd.) Contrary to popular belief, the pitch meeting is not generally where decisions to sign an author are made: it is merely the first step in an ongoing conversation.

However, by having that conversation, and being able to write REQUESTED MATERIALS — PNWA on the outside of your submission, your work will be able to skip several steps in the querying process. Which alone is worth the price of admission.

Incidentally, you do not need to have a meeting with or pitch to an agent who attends the conference in order to benefit from having seen him at the conference. Agents ADORE writers who attend conferences — in their eyes, it’s a mark of professionalism in a writer, a desire to learn the marketing side of the business. So if you see several agents whom you like at the agents’ forum, but feel too shy to buttonhole them for a quick pitch, go ahead and query them right after the conference, mentioning in the FIRST LINE of your query letter that you enjoyed hearing them speak at PNWA. This will assure that your submission goes into the savvy conference-goers pile, rather than in the pile with the other 99% of the week’s submissions.

One caveat, however: NEVER write REQUESTED MATERIALS on an envelope addressed to an agent or editor UNLESS the recipient has actually asked you to send the material. True, agents are often so swamped at conferences, particularly big ones like PNWA, that they will not necessarily remember every pitch they heard, or even every pitch they liked, by the time they get back to their offices, but it’s NEVER a good idea to start a new relationship on a lie.

Which makes it very much to your advantage to approach as many agents in your area as possible at the conference. It’s been my experience that an agent caught after a class, on the dais after the forum, or even in the hallway is marginally MORE likely to hand a business card to a writer than an agent seated comfortably, hearing several hours of pitches in a row. In the pitch meetings, your pitch is being measured against the other 15-minute meetings, where there is quite a bit of time to consider the book concept — and sometimes reject it. The more they can winnow submissions at that point, the less work for them and their staffs after the conference.

But when an agent’s in motion, her instinct is usually to get through the interaction quickly — and what’s the quickest way for an agent to part with an aspiring writer on friendly terms? Why, to hand the writer a business card and say, “Why don’t you send me the first chapter?” It’s a win-win situation.

Yes, yes, I know — we would all prefer that the agent of our dreams fall in love with our book on the spot, so it seems almost underhanded to use an agent’s overbooked schedule as a means to obtain a reading. But to be brutally honest, the 30 seconds or minute you take of the agent’s time in the hallway is approximately the same amount of time the screeners at her agency spend on reading the average unsolicited query letter — shocking, isn’t it? — and that informal in-person meeting is statistically far more likely to result in your being asked to send manuscript pages than would the same book pitched the same way in a query letter.

As long as you’re polite, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with using the hallway pitch to get your work read. Try to avoid buttonholing agents who are obviously rushing into the bathroom, of course, or juggling a food plate and a drink in a buffet line, and always ask if this is a good time. If they say no, ask when would be a better time — or would they prefer it if you just sent the first chapter? To an agent trying to help himself to his third bowl of pasta salad, the latter option might seem just dandy.

Seeing a pattern here?

It’s always nice to begin a buttonhole pitch with a specific compliment: “I know that you must be swamped this weekend, but I just loved what you said in the agents’ forum about X. I couldn’t get an appointment with you, but would you mind giving me a couple of minutes, to hear about my book, either now or after you finish your dessert?” Be profuse in your thanks, regardless of whether they say yes or no, and then leave immediately. (This last part is essential, to avoid giving the impression of being a stalker. Oh, and perhaps this goes without saying, but to prevent any possible confusion: DON’T STALK THESE PEOPLE. Approach them only in the well-lit, well-populated areas of the conference, and with respect.)

Think about the interaction I’ve just described from the agent’s POV. It’s kind of flattering, isn’t it? People LOVE to be told that they made a good point in a speech, as long as the compliment is sincere — almost everybody has some fears associated with public speaking, even people who speak in public regularly.

I hear some of you out there grumbling: if it’s that easy to charm an agent, why isn’t it possible to charm one so much that he will want to grab the manuscript now and read it on the airplane home? Or in his hotel room, so he can sign me before another agent at the conference snatches me up?

The airplane question has a very, very simple answer: because manuscripts are heavy. Ever tote more than one 400-page manuscript in your shoulder bag? Agents have. They know better than to add three or four more to their carry-on luggage. Far, far better to allow the stalwart shoulders of the USPS to bear the burden.

As for an agent’s reading the book in his hotel room… well, perhaps my view on this is colored by the fact that I have been attending literary conferences since I was very young and VERY cute, but in my experience, agents and editors who use the phrase “in my hotel room” have not usually been talking about literature at the time. (For the benefit of those of you who are new to the conference scene, or just very young and very cute, there is NO legitimate book-related reason that a writer would need to visit an agent, editor, or anyone else in the publishing industry in his hotel room at a conference. Nothing you could possibly do there, other than lock him outside until you write a brilliant novel from beginning to end, will help you get published. If anyone at any writers’ conference ever tells you otherwise, walk away as fast as you can.)

The only exception I have ever encountered on the conference circuit was an eager-beaver agent who practically assaulted the winner of the night’s literary biggest prize immediately after it was awarded, demanding to see the book that instant. The nonplused writer rushed home (thank goodness she was local), printed out a copy, and rushed back to deliver it. The agent did in fact read the first chapter that night, gushed over it the next day — and then took it back to Los Angeles, where she took three weeks to read it.

In the end, from the writer’s POV, despite all of that nocturnal running around, the eager-beaver agent ended up doing precisely what most of the other agents at the conference did, reading the book after she got back home. So, in the long run, what was the difference between merely asking the author to mail her the book, and demanding it on the spot, other than inconveniencing the writer?

There endeth today’s lesson. For those of you who are planning to attend the conference: yes, the conference is not until July, but remember, registration is $50 cheaper if your form is postmarked by June 6th.

And yes, I’m going to repeat this, to the boredom of those of you who have been reading through the whole series: if you are looking for information about the agents and editors coming to the conference, so you can choose your appointment preferences wisely, check out my posts about the scheduled attendees, April 26 — May 12 for the agents and May 18 — 26 for the editors.

If I seem to be harping on the contest in general and registration deadlines in particular, it is because I would like to meet as many of my readers as possible at the conference — yes, I will be there, well marked with a nametag and eager to answer people’s questions. I’m going to be running a pitch practicing booth, where you can get feedback on your pitch BEFORE you give it to an agent or an editor, so come on by and say hello.

And had I mentioned: on June 24th, I’m teaching a PNWA Writing Connections class (translation: free) on how to polish your pitch for the conference. Advance preparation REALLY pays off when you’re sitting face-to-face with an agent, so do try to attend, if you can.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

My, I’ve been receiving a mountain of e-mails from your collective selves of late! It really seems to have hit home for a lot of you that conference season is now officially upon us. Summer is the time when serious writers’ minds should turn to marketing their work.

If you are still vacillating about whether to attend this summer’s PNWA conference, do bear in mind that if you can make a commitment by June 6th (that’s five days from now, according to my calendar), you will get $50 off the price of admission, and a whopping $100 off if you are a member. Regardless of whether you decide before or after next Tuesday, do take a gander at my write-ups about the agents scheduled to attend the conference (posts from April 26 — May 12; check the archives), as well as the editors (May 18 — 26), to help you decide whom to rank where in your conference choices.

At the risk of sounding like a tape recorder, do bear in mind that the information I have compiled on these fine people was gleaned from the standard industry databases and conference circuit talk, neither of which are noted for being 100% accurate. The main deals database, for instance, reflects the publishing world’s understanding of what a book is GOING to be, as of the point at which it is sold, not the book as it is when it is ultimately published. The deals lists are like book proposals that way: the originally projected image is not always identical to the eventual product.

I mention this not merely to give you a heads-up, but to admit that I was apparently misinformed about something I reported in my piece on agent {name removed at agent’s request; if you liked the books I am about to mention, I can only suggest that you contact the authors directly and ask who represented them.}I can only suggest that you c: I received a very nice e-mail the other day from his client Don Hoglund, DVM, author of the very interesting-sounding NOBODY’S HORSES (check out my post of May 9 for details), informing me that the coauthor listed in the deals database ultimately did not end up collaborating on the book! I’m making arrangements this very minute to change that tidbit in the archives, Dr. H, and thanks for bringing it to my attention.

The Mystery Agent’s clients seem to keep a very close eye on their web presences — which is an extremely smart thing for an author to do these days, now that the Internet has made every reader a prospective book reviewer — because I received a darling message from ANOTHER of his clients this morning. Bob Tarte, author of ENSLAVED BY DUCKS (certainly one of the best titles ever produced by human pen), mentioned in his courtly note that he had just finished final edits on his next book, FOWL WEATHER (another grand title), due out from Algonquin in the spring of 2007.

I was delighted by his timing, because this information provides a lovely and apt example of the post-signing timelines I was discussing yesterday: a LOT of time can pass between signing a contract and the book’s coming out, as all of you who have been following my memoir’s saga are no doubt already aware. If the databases are correct, Algonquin acquired FOWL WEATHER in February, 2005. Now, in June, 2006, the final edits have been completed, and it’s coming out next year. Just so you know, this is a fairly standard timeline — print queues are established months and months in advance of actual printing.

It just goes to show you: if you plan to see your work in print, expect something of a wait after each time you sign something major. It’s a long, long road, so do celebrate each milestone on the way to publication. (It also goes to show you, I suppose, that a nice little thank-you note to someone who mentions you online is never amiss. Your mother was right: good manners pay off. Incidentally, if you want to see a great example of an offbeat-but-professional writer’s bio, Mr. Tarte’s bio is quite an excellent example.

All right, enough about my past advice — on to the future. Since I was so full of grim realities yesterday, today I want to talk about what happens when an agent falls in love with a pitch at a conference.

We all know the fantasy version, right? Timid author creeps into meeting, clutching manuscript, blurts out a few halting sentences about the plot — and the agent climbs onto her chair, screaming at the top of her lungs, “At last, the book I have been seeking for my entire professional life!” She signs the author on the spot, of course, and the book is published before the end of the year. Career made!

Um, no.

I have very mixed feelings about the verbal pitching process, precisely because its immediacy does raise this kind of expectation — which, in turn, leaves good writers new to the game disappointed when they get an ordinary positive response. Verbal pitching by authors, as I have mentioned before, is not all that common in the publishing industry; it’s really the province of screenwriters and literary agents. This is a printed page-based industry, not one based on elocution, or even electronica, although increasingly, books are marketed via the latter two means. Still, most of the industry prefers the old-fashioned ways: the paper query, the printed-out manuscript, the rejection letter handled by someone in a postal uniform.

Which is why, incidentally, many agencies still do not accept e-mail queries: they simply prefer to deal in paper. Of those who do, most are either newer agencies, searching for younger, hipper authors, or more established agencies that suddenly became post-shy after that rash of anthrax threats a few years back.

There are pluses and minuses to dealing with agencies that accept e-mail queries. Undoubtedly, e-mail queries are more convenient and planet-friendly — but they are also far, far easier to reject. One keystroke, and your heartfelt plea is deleted. It actually takes someone licking an envelope to reject you the traditional way.

While I’m on the subject, do be wary of agents or editors who ask you to send significant parts of your manuscript electronically for their review. In the first place, the same ease of rejection applies as with e-mailed queries: the first word that displeases them, and they can hit the DELETE key. The second reason has greater long-term ramifications. Since forwarding e-mail is so easy, you have absolutely no way of knowing where your work will end up, and since copyright consists partially in controlling where and when your work is available to be read, e-mailing chapters is not particularly smart legally, at least until you already have a signed contract with those to whom you are sending it.

It is considered perfectly acceptable within the industry to respond to a request for an electronically-transmitted chapter with a polite note saying that you have just dropped a printed copy in the mail, along with a SASE. This is legitimate, even if you originally contacted the agent by e-mail.

Okay, back to the topic at hand. Let’s assume that you and your book made an exceptionally favorable impression on the agent sitting in front of you. What happens next? Well, 99% of the time, the agent will smile warmly and slide his business card across the tabletop toward you. “Send me the first chapter,” he will say. Or the first 50 pages. Or, sometimes, the whole book. “I’m pleased to have met you.” Then your meeting will end.

And you will rush home, read every syllable of those requested pages OUT LOUD and IN HARD COPY (I hadn’t harped on THAT in awhile, had I?) to make sure that it is utterly error-free, in standard format, and charming to boot, and carry it to the post office. Make sure to include a SASE and a cover letter thanking the agent for his interest and reminding him both where he met you AND that he asked for the manuscript. Take the largest marking pen provided by the USPS and write REQUESTED MATERIALS on the outside of the envelope or box, too, so it does not languish in the unsolicited manuscript pile when it gets there.

Not nearly so dramatic as the fantasy version, is it?

And then you will wait while your submission makes its way through the levels of screeners at the agency (the agent is seldom the first reader). And in the summertime, that can take a while, but there is absolutely no way that any agent is going to pick up a book without having read it. Because, really, books are not sold to agents on the author’s ability to make a persuasive verbal pitch, no matter how good the premise. They are sold on the writing — and there are plenty of people out there who speak well but who cannot write. And vice versa.

See why I advised you a few days ago to have a writing sample in hand at your meeting? A well-constructed sentence is the lingua franca of the realm you are entering. Come to the meeting with your pockets fairly jingling with that kind of coin, as well as with a killer pitch on the tip of your tongue, and your follow-though will be as productive as your serve.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

P.S.: For those of you PNWA contest entrants who have been wondering, the finalists will be notified by mail by June 15th, I’m told. So if you were holding off on early registration for the conference, pending learning whether your nametag would be graced with a rainbow-hued ribbon, you might want to reconsider your strategy.

Hello, readers —

Remember last week, when I was going on about pigs in pokes, and the undesirability of buying them? I mentioned that I had no idea what a poke was. Well, I opened my work e-mail over the weekend, and fabulous and intrepid reader Janet had TOLD ALL:

“A poke is early type of paper bag–something to hold candy, peas and other types of loose foodstuffs. It is essentially a square piece of paper folded into a cone. The bottom point is folded up so that the candy or dried beans won’t fall out. The sheets of paper came in different sizes 4″, 8″ and 10″. Apparently, the shopkeep could figure out costs per weight this way.”

Have you ever seen a clearer description of anything? But wait, Janet did even more research on the subject:

“The pig in a poke is a great image as you would really have to stuff the pig into poke pretty hard. Be pretty tight. General stores used these for years until a girl in New England invented the type of squared paper bag with a floor some time after the Civil War. As for the poke, I’m told that in Germany you can still get food this way.”

Janet, please find me at the conference, if you will be attending: I want to buy you a drink, or at least a cup of coffee, because now, I have the pleasing image in my head of all of those American agents and editors who travel every year to the Frankfurt Book Fair, buying pigs in pokes from street vendors. After hearing them spout the truism for so many years, that image makes me absurdly happy.

While I am praising wonderful readers, Arleen, who has apparently TAKEN classes with Robert J. Ray and Jack Remick (who will be offering Pathways to the Novel on the Sunday following the conference), was kind enough to send in the class’ website. Not only that, but she provided a link to more info about co-teacher Jack Remick Add to this her rave review of the class she took, and I think I can safely say that this constitutes a recommendation.

Do remember, the Sunday classes fill up fast, so if you are interested in taking one, please sign up soon. Also, don’t forget that registering for the summer conference BEFORE June 6th (better known as a week from today) will give you a $50 discount on the cost of attending! If you have not yet picked your top choices for agent and editor meetings, check out my blogs about the scheduled attendees, April 26 — May 12 for the agents and May 18 — 26 for the editors.

And, while I’m at it: if you have not already put the first 50 pp. of your work into standard format, so it is ready to send out to any agents or editors at the conference who might conceivably ask to see it, check out my post of February 19. If you do not already know why this is an EXCELLENT idea, consider my recommendation of the previous sentence multiplied a thousandfold. (Not adhering to standard manuscript format — which is DIFFERENT from book format — has cost a lot of good writers a fair reading from agency screeners.)

My, that was a lot of housekeeping, wasn’t it? I actually do have a topic for today: what materials should you bring with you to the conference — and, more importantly, to your agent and editor meetings?

At minimum, of course, you’re going to want a trusty, comfortable pen and notebook with a backing hard enough to write upon, to take good notes, and a shoulder bag sturdy enough to hold all of the handouts you will accumulate and books you will buy at the conference. I always like to include a few sheets of blank printer paper in my bag, so I can draw a diagram of the agents’ forum, and another of the editors’, to keep track of who was sitting where and note a few physical characteristics, along with their expressed preferences in books.

Why do I do this? Well, these fora are typically scheduled at the very beginning of the first day of the conference, a very, very long day. By the time people are wandering into their appointments at the end of the second day, dehydrated from convention hall air and overwhelmed with masses of professional information, I’ve found that they’re often too tired to recall WHICH editor had struck them the day before as someone with whom to try to finagle a last-minute appointment. Being able to whip out the diagrams has jogged many a memory, including mine.

I always, always, ALWAYS bring bottled water to conferences — even to ones like PNWA, where the organizers tend to be very good about keeping water available. When you’re wedged into the middle of a row of eager note-takers in a classroom, it’s not always the easiest thing in the world to make your way to the table with the water on it, nor to step over people with a full glass in your hand. A screw-top bottle in your bag can save both spillage and inconvenience for your neighbors.

If I seem to be harping on the dehydration theme, there’s a good reason: every indoor conference I have ever attended has dried out my contact lenses, and personally, I prefer to meet people when my lenses are not opaque with grime. I’m wacky that way. If your eyes dry out easily, consider wearing your glasses instead.

Even if you have perfect vision, there’s a good reason to keep on sippin’. If you are even VAGUELY prone to nerves — and who isn’t, in preparing to pitch? — being dehydrated can add substantially to your sense of being slightly off-kilter. You want to be at your best. Both conferences and hotels, like airports, see a lot of foot traffic, so the week leading up to the conference is NOT the time to skip the vitamins. I go one step further: at the conference, I dump packets of Emergen-C into my water bottle, to keep my immune system strong.

If this seems like frou-frou advice, buttonhole me at the conference, and I’ll regale you with stories about nervous pitchers who have passed out in front of agents. Trust me, this is a time to be VERY good to yourself. If I had my way, the hallways would be lined with massage chairs, to reduce people’s stress.

You will also want to bring some easily transferable pieces of paper with your contact information printed on it — why, come to think of it, a business card would be perfect for that! Seriously, it is VERY worth your while to have some inexpensive business cards made, or to print some up at home, for two excellent reasons. First, unless you make a point of sitting by yourself in a corner for the entire conference, you are probably going to meet other writers that you like — maybe even some with whom you would like to exchange chapters, start a writers’ group, or just keep in contact to remind yourself that we’re all in this together. The easier you make it for them to contact you, the more likely they are to remain in contact.

It’s just that simple.

Second, it’s always a good idea to be able to hand your contact info to an agent or editor who expresses interest in your work. They don’t often ask for it, but if they do — in a situation, say, where an editor from a major press who is not allowed to pick up an unagented book REALLY wants to hook you up with an agent — it’s best to be prepared.

I shall no doubt return to this topic between now and the conference, but let me start the chant now: avoid the extremely common mistake of walking into ANY writers’ gathering thinking that the only people it is important for you to meet are the bigwigs: the agents, the editors, the keynote speakers. Obviously, if you can swig a one-on-one with Ann Rule, go for it — I once spent several hours stranded in a small airport with her, and she is an absolutely delightful conversationalist. But don’t let star-watching distract you from interacting with the less well-known writers teaching the classes, who are there to help YOU, or the writer sitting next to you in class.

I have met some of the best writers I know by the simple dint of turning to the person rummaging through the packaged teas on the coffee table and saying, “So, what do you write?” Believe me, it’s worth doing. Someday, some of your fellow conference attendees are going to be bigwigs themselves, and don’t you want to be able to say that you knew them when?

And even if this were not true (but it is), writing is an isolating business — for every hour that even the most commercially successful writer spends interacting with others in the business, she spends hundreds alone, typing away. The more friends you can make who will understand your emotional ups and downs as you work through scenes in a novel, or query agents, or gnaw your fingernails down to the knuckle, waiting for an editor to decide whether to buy your book, the better.

Even the most charmed writer, the one with both the best writing and the best pure, dumb luck, has days of depression. Not all of us are lucky enough to live and work with people who appreciate the necessity of revising a sentence for the sixth time. Writers’ conferences are the ideal places to find friends to support you, the ones you call when your nearest and dearest think you are insane for sinking your heart and soul into a book that may not see print for a decade.

So stuff some business cards into your conference bag (if you file a Schedule C to claim your writing as a business, the cost of having the cards made is usually tax-deductible — and no, you don’t have to make money as a writer in every year you file a Schedule C for it. Talk to a tax advisor experienced in working with artists.), along with a folder containing several copies of your synopsis AND five copies of the first five pages of your book, as a writing sample.

Why? Well, not all agents do this, but many, when they are seriously taken with a pitch, will ask to see a few pages on the spot, to see if the writing is good enough to justify the serious time commitment of reading the whole book.

They don’t like, you see, to buy a pig in a poke.

Having these pages ready to whip out at a moment’s notice will make you look substantially more professional than if you blush and murmur something about printing it out, or simply hand the agent your entire manuscript. Don’t bother to bring your entire book with you to the conference, UNLESS you are a finalist in one of the major categories. You will never, ever, EVER miss an opportunity by offering to mail it instead, and in fact, agents almost universally prefer it. This is true, even if they insist that they want to read it on the airplane home.

Why the exception for the contest finalists? Well, agents tend to be pretty competitive people. Literally the only reason that an agent would ask for the whole thing right away is if he is afraid that another agent at the conference will sign you before he’s had a chance to read it — and I can tell you from experience that the category winners and placers at the PNWA do get mobbed by agents. (In case you didn’t know, one of the main prizes that the first-place winners receive, in addition to the nifty gold pin, is a breakfast meeting with ALL of the agents and editors. Awfully easy to chat about your work over fruit cup, I always find.) So I have known agents to read a chapter or two of the winners’ work in their hotel rooms.

Otherwise, don’t hurt your back lugging the manuscript box around; the sample will do just as well. From the writer’s POV, the sole purpose of the writing sample is to get the agent to ask you to send the rest of the book, so make sure that these pages are impeccably written, totally free of errors, and in standard format. (Again: if this is news to you, rush into the archives immediately, and take a gander at my post for February 19th.) If you feel that an excerpt from the end of the book showcases your work better, use that, but if you can at all manage it, choose the first five pages of the book as your sample — it just exudes confidence in your work.

More conference preparation tips follow, of course. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini